Grammaticalized sensory evidence as typological peculiarity of the North Asian languages

Abstract

The paper defines a semantic zone of non-visual sensory evidence, grammaticalized in the verbal system, as “sensory evidence.” Sensory evidence grammaticalized in the verbal system is rare in contemporary languages. It is likely to be found in languages that are or were used in the recent past traditional cultures of ancient origin. Many Eurasian languages have evidential grammatical verbal forms, with most not having sensory evidential forms. Such verbal forms were known as auditive in Eurasia only in four Samoyedic languages: Nenets, Enets, Nganasan, and Selkup. Recently, the traditional Yukaghir folklore archaic texts collected by V. I. Jochelson in the late 19th – early 20th centuries revealed similar grammatical and semantic analog of Samoyedic auditive, suggesting sensory evidential verbal grammemes to be more widespread in the past in the languages of aboriginal Northern Asia peoples, in diachronic retrospective. Our main goal was to identify the inter-disciplinary evidence of diachronically earlier communicative functions and meanings of Northern Asian sensory evidential verbal forms. These functions and meanings are most informatively presented in the archaic texts of Nenets traditional folklore, especially shaman songs and heroic epos. The paper proves basic semantics of the Northern Samoyedic sensory evidential grammemes to refer to the auditive perception of non-visible situations (events). Thus, non-visible events were opposed grammatically to visual situations by verbal forms concerned. Considering historical ethnology data in an interdisciplinary way, the author explains the fact above as a grammaticalized language replica of fundamental mental opposition of ancient mythological thinking – the opposition of visible and non-visible situations.