Himalayan Linguistics

Chhitkul-Rākchham has a postverbal marker, =niŋ, denoting “engagement”, a newly proposed category that encodes the relative accessibility of a state of affairs to the speaker and addressee. Statistically rare (60 instantiations in an 8-hour corpus consisting of monologues, conversations and stimuli tasks) and with its occurrence entirely pragmatically motivated, =niŋ is constrained to contexts where the speaker confidently assumes that the interlocutor shares the knowledge about the situation expressed by the clause to which it is attached. As such, it differs from two additional members of the same category, the tags man=ta and ne=te, which convey a lesser degree of assertiveness in comparison. Whereas =niŋ is independent from evidentiality (but not from reliability judgements), the previous two tags, where the perceptual =ta or an alternant (=te) is a key component, are not. Engagement is otherwise found to be incompatible with unexpectedness and common knowledge, two pragmatic functions sometimes served by evidentials cross-linguistically. The Chhitkul-Rākchham case thus suggests that any idea of a clear-cut distinction between engagement and evidentiality is inconclusive.