This dissertation examines the three major evidential categories in Standard Tibetan—ego, direct, and indirect. Indirect is argued to be a performative epistemic modal; its performativity accounts for its highly restricted distribution. Direct is argued to be complex, consisting of a demonstrative component, which requires that the marked situation be stage-level, and a pragmatic component, which requires that the marked situation have been observed. Evidence from conditionals and from the Amdo variety of Tibetan show that these two components can be disentangled from each other. Ego is argued to be a morphologically zero, default, ‘elsewhere’ case, which indicates either immediate or groundless knowledge.
Aside from its contribution to Tibeto-Burman linguistics, this dissertation touches on various theoretically important issues in pragmatics and the philosophy of language. First, in discussing ego, it is argued that a property-based semantic view of attitudes de se has no advantage over a proposition-based pragmatic theory. Special uses of ego with names de se and performatives highlight this point.
Second, it is suggested that questions be analyzed as in the traditional answer set approach to the semantics of questions; but rather than taking a question to denote a set of propositions, it is argued that a question should denote a set of assertions instead.