A polysemous analysis of ‘Factive’ evidence markers in Lhasa Tibetan

Abstract This preliminary study argues that the Lhasa Tibetan (LT) Factive evidential category is fundamentally polysemous. Aside from capturing the category’s full semantic range, a polysemous account of Factive also resolves apparent contradictions in prior descriptions and better predicts its distribution in discourse and narration. Drawing on elicited scenarios and consultant judgments, I show that the uses of Factive constructions cluster into three related but distinct functions — familiar knowledge , common knowledge , and logical inference — which vary along two dimensions: (i) whether a specific perceptual act is construed and (ii) how knowledge is distributed between interlocutors. These dimensions yield predictable, context-specific effects on the tense-aspect and discourse-pragmatic interpretations of a sentence indicating systematic polysemy, rather than semantic vagueness ( Geeraerts 1993 : 223–272). Diachronically, LT Factive forms derive from two constructions, * red 1 and * yod.pa.red ( Shao 2016 ). Although both contain the element * red , they entered the Sentence Ending paradigm (the morphosyntactic paradigm that encodes epistemic-evidential contrasts) with distinct connotations which were later aligned as a single category. This Factive category serves as an effective strategy for negotiating interlocutors’ “territories of information” ( Kamio 1994 , 1997 ): speakers use Factive to signal contextually varying values of knowledge ownership, epistemic proximity and perceived reliability. Consequently, the category’s polysemy has the paradigmatic effect of increasing the number of available epistemic-evidential contrasts, giving the Sentence Ending paradigm greater expressive reach.