New publication: The General Fact/Generic Factual in Yolmo and Tamang (Studies in Language)
The Yolmo evidential system includes a category for generally known facts. Things like lemons are sour or tea is sweet (in Nepal at least) are marked using the general fact evidential òŋge. The form òŋ is also the verb ‘to come’.
This evidential turns up in every dialect of Yolmo documented to date, but it doesn’t exist in any other Tibetic language, not the specific form, or the even the semantic category. There is one language with a similar category though, and that’s the variety of Tamang spoken near the Melamchi Yolmo villages. The Tamang form kha-pa covers similar evidential semantics, and is also based on the lexical verb ‘come’.
In this paper we look at these similar forms, and how the similarities between them and social history of the area indicates the Yolmo òŋge is likely a calque from the Tamang kha-pa. I’m very grateful to my colleagues Thomas Owen-Smith for working with me on this paper. Thomas was working on the documentation of this variety of Tamang while I was writing my thesis about Yolmo evidentiality. Chatting with him helped me make sense of this unique feature of Yolmo and I’m so happy we’ve turned our long conversations into a not very long paper setting out our analysis.
Abstract
This paper examines the similarity of the Yolmo ‘general fact’ evidential and the ‘generic fact’ evidential in the Tamang dialect spoken in the valley of the Indrawati Khola. Yolmo òŋge is unlike any evidential attested in other Tibetic languages, but shares features with 1kha-pa in the local dialect of Tamang. Semantically, they both are used for situations that are generally known facts. Structurally, both are copulas with evidential functions that are formed using the lexical verb ‘come’. We argue that language contact between Tamang speakers of the Indrawati Khola area and Yolmo speakers in the Melamchi Valley led to the Yolmo language calquing the Tamang form. We illustrate these copulas and their relationship because grammaticalisation of copulas from a lexical verb ‘come’ is cross-linguistically uncommon.
Reference
Gawne, L. & T. Owen-Smith. 2022. The General Fact/Generic Factual in Yolmo and Tamang. Studies in Language. Issue number forthcoming. doi: 10.1075/sl.21049.gaw
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Gretchen: My favourite theory of evidentiality – which I don’t know if I actually believe this, but I’d like to believe it a lot – is that we’re developing a system of evidentiality using acronyms on the internet.
Lauren: Oh, okay! Share your theory with me.
Gretchen: I’m not committed to this theory, but I like the idea of it. And maybe someday it’ll be true. I think the example that I’m gonna use – because it’s a theory that I talked about on Tumblr five years ago and I still think it has some potential. The Tumblr-appropriate example that I had was “They’d make a terrible couple” because people talk about shipping a lot on Tumblr. I think you can say this with varying degrees of certainty or belief or emotion or knowledge or something. I don’t know if they quite qualify as evidentials because none of them mean, “I heard that…” or “I saw that…” but you can say something like “Tbh, they’d make a terrible couple” or “Imo, they’d make a terrible couple” or “Iirc, they’d make a terrible couple” or “Omg, they’d make a terrible couple.” This at least adds something – “To be honest” or “In my opinion” or “If I recall correctly” or “Oh my god.” This at least adds some sort of flavor to this. Again, this is very hypothetical theory and I’m not sure if it’s a real…
Lauren: Well, they’re definitely adding epistemics, so that’s more about the certainty stuff we were talking about. But certainty could be a gateway to evidence if we continue to use them.
Gretchen: Okay. So, we’re like the toddler version of evidentials where we’re putting certainty on?
Lauren: Potentially. This is potentially a gateway to evidence.
Gretchen: I like this.
Lauren: We just need to create a bunch of acronyms that are like “Isy” – “I saw yesterday.”
Gretchen: “Iht” – “I hear that.”
Lauren: Yeah. That’s a good one.
Gretchen: I don’t know if these are gonna catch on – “Ist” – “I see that.”
Lauren: “Itt” – “I think that.”
Gretchen: “Iit” – “I infer that”?
Lauren: Oh, yeah.
Gretchen: I mean, there’s “Til,” “Today I learned,” but that doesn’t commit to the source of the information.
Lauren: No.
Gretchen: Hmm. Okay. We’ve got some ways to go before internet acronyms become evidentials.
Excerpt from Episode 32 of Lingthusiasm: You heard about it but I was there - Evidentiality
Listen to the episode, read the full transcript, or check out more links about syntax, semantics, language and society, and words.
The theme of this year’s NAACL, which ended last week, was data bias and privacy, topics of great social consequence. On the former, many…
A very good overview by Adina Williams of why machine translation is hard and why it’s useful to have humans (and especially linguists) in the loop to know which things require more context. Excerpt:
So, now we’ve seen three new examples of where translations fail. They are very well controlled: in each example of a translation mismatch, we’re translating only a single sentence with only one grammatical system. In reality, pairs of languages may differ across numerous grammatical systems, even within the same sentence. We could have wanted to translate Turkish sentences with both “genderless” pronouns and evidentiality into English, and then we would multiple the potential translation alternatives.
These three examples are just the three I could think up off the top of my head post-NAACL (as I write this, I’m reminded of others to try: we could look at translation mismatches in case, determiners and definites, question particles, clusivity, numeral classifiers, and this list could definitely go on and on).
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Like many analysts of evidentials, Floyd declares the link between information source and validation to be fairly straightforward; unlike most, he provides a theoretical basis to explain this link. Working within the framework of cognitive linguistics, which views semantics as intricately linked to the experiences and cultural background of speakers, Floyd argues that evidentials are a type of ‘grounding predication’ in which speakers and listeners construe situations using, and as a result of, the linguistic means at their disposal. Construal affects are of particular relevance to evidential systems because they affect how deictic expressions are used and understood. Evidentials inherently express distinctions of subjectivity and objectivity because they link the observer in a perceptual situation with the event or entity observed, grammatically placing the speaker in one way or another ‘within’ the conceptualization. Evidentials are thus both subjective and deictic in nature: the speaker’s experience serves as one reference point for the proposition, reflecting information ‘specifically about the experiential justification a speaker has for making a statement’ (Floyd, 1999:46). Evidentials can imply epistemic values, Floyd says, because they are notions that express different relationships of directness (based on the speaker’s source of information) and proximity which, taken together lead to epistemic distinctions. Floyd’s view is supported by the cross-linguistic tendencies observed for evidential systems, that they almost invariably code the speaker’s (rather than a nonspeaker’s) participation or commitment and are hierarchical in nature.
Hyperlinks are a ubiquitous feature of the internet, but unlike other elements of internet language use, there hasn’t been a lot of published work that considers the linguistics of hyperlinks. Or really any work as far as I can tell (but please correct me if I’m wrong!). Hyperlinks anchor to written text, and interact with it in ways that are interesting both syntactically and semantically.
From time to time I’ve talked about the linguistics of hyperlinks on this blog, twitter and even Lingthusiasm. I’ve always planned to write a research article about it, but it has never quite fit with my other work. I am hoping that writing a blog post will at least allow me to get the main ideas out of my head rather than continuing to languish at the bottom of my research list.
[update! I’m delighted to report that in 2011 Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine presented a conference paper “The Constituency of Hyperlinks in a Hypertext Corpus“ at a conference and the slides are available on his website]
Hyperlinks and the structure of the World Wide Web
A hyperlink allows the user to move to a different document, or location within the same document. The concept arose in computer science in the mid-20th century, and Tim Berners-Lee used the idea while designing the World Wide Web in the late 1980s. On the World Wide Web, website are built on Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and you move between them using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). That is to say, links between pages on the WWW are fundamental to how we built out the human-navigable plane built on the infrastructure of the internet.
There are, broadly, two ways to present a hyperlink in a text. Inline links are where the text of the hyperlink is fully visible, such as www.superlinguo.com. Hypertext links are where the link is embedded within a string of anchor text, so if I were to mention that this blog is Superlinguo, I can link to the blog homepage in the running text. This is where a lot of the linguistic fun happens.
I have never learnt to be proficient at HTML, but like anybody who enjoyed customising MySpace or LiveJournal pages back in the day, or still spends their time making websites (like this one you’re currently reading on tumblr dot com), I can recognise the code for a hyperlink:
<a href="superlinguo.com">Superlinguo</a>
Above, you have the opening of the tag, the reference to the hyperlink, and then the anchor text that the hyperlink will be attached to, and the closing tag. The end result is: Superlinguo. (Actually, just to make it fun Tumblr have a fun extra layer of hyperlink they generate, like many social media platforms - a reminder of how many layers there are to the online experience these days) There are slightly different ways hyperlinks work on sites like Wikipedia, but it’s a fundamentally similar mechanic. Most of us will deploy a zillion hyperlinks without ever looking at the underlying code, thanks to richtext editing interfaces that provide a little button to click. Thank you clever internet people for making it so easy for us to write and link to things on the internet.
Hyperlinks as part of our online linguistic competence
So, as long as you’ve been on the internet, you’ve had to deal with hyperlinks, and if you do any blogging, website building or other projects on the internet you have been building documents with hyperlinks for many years, possibly about as long as you’ve been literate.
I’m going to discuss the linguistic features of hyperlinks by looking at their evidential function, the pragmatics of hyperlink use, and the syntactic relationship between hypertext links and the anchor text.
The evidential properties of hyperlinks
When you read a news article, or a blog or Wikipedia article, it’s likely that there will be many hyperlinks in that text, and you’ll never click on a single one of them. Those links are there as supporting evidence for the argument the writer is making. When I linked to Tim Berners-Lee’s Wikipedia bio above, you probably didn’t click, it just gave more weight to my argument about TBL developing the WWW.
Evidentials indicate source of evidence for claims made by the author. In spoken English we do this by overtly saying “Wikipedia says...” or “I read that...”. In written academic English we can use standard citation formats for sources of information. Standard citation formats usually privileged sources within the academic tradition, while a hyperlink can just as easily link to a tweet or a cat photo as an academic journal article.
In other languages there are features of the grammar that mark the source of information. When source of information is part of the grammar, this is known as evidentiality. I wrote my PhD thesis about evidentiality in Lamjung Yolmo. In this language, and many Tibetan languages, there are different forms of the verb ‘to be’ depending on whether you know the information you’re talking about from your own long-held experience, or because you saw or heard it happen, or because someone told you about it. Evidentiality occurs in around a quarter of the world’s languages.
Hyperlinks act as an evidential that covers a broad range of evidence that can be summed up as “I know this from evidence over at this other location”. It might be information someone else wrote down, or said in a video, or presented as a song, or even information that the person making the link wrote somewhere else (just as I linked to my PhD thesis above). Not only are hyperlinks technically not part of the grammar, but they also don’t fit neatly into the semantic categories of known evidential systems.
There is one particular similarity between evidentials and hyperlinks I find intriguing, and that is their function as deictics. ‘Deictic’ is the fancy linguist word for ‘pointing’. There are deictic hand gestures we use to send people in the right direction, but there are also words that have a deictic function. ‘Me’ and ‘you’ don’t mean any particular person out of context, in the context they’re used in they point to specific people in that interaction. Same with many other words, ‘tomorrow’ right now points to a different date than the 'tomorrow’ in a week’s time. Ferdinand de Haan (2001) has written at length about how evidentials are deictic because they point to the source of the information. Using a reported speech evidential ‘points to’ another person who said the information originally, and using a ‘direct visual evidential’ points to the event that occurred. Hyperlinks do this kind of pointing in a very literal way. If the reader wants they can be sent directly to the information that is being pointed to by the hyperlink. The evidential function of hyperlinks provides some off-center support for de Haan’s approach to evidentiality.
Of course, that ability to click and be sent to the original source is one final way in which hyperlinks fundamentally differ from grammatical evidentials. Your audience can verify your claim. If you say you know something because someone told you, it’s often not within your audience’s ability to verify this claim. This ability to verify has interesting implications for the pragmatics of hyperlinks.
The pragmatics of hyperlinks
In work on evidentiality, particularly reported speech evidentials, there’s a lot of discussion of how including your source of information allows you some distance from the claims made. I particularly appreciate Lev Michael’s (2012) more nuanced approach that reported speech can also be used to claim the authority of the original speaker too, and that context plays a role (I used this as the basis of my approach to reported speech evidentiality in Gawne 2015).
It would be interesting to see what kind of stance-taking towards the original content does emerge from hyperlink use, and I wonder if it differs between, say, science bloggers (based more on an academic model of building your argument on citations to existing work) and gossip bloggers (creating plausible deniability in the face of potential defamation lawsuits).
Just as with evidentiality, the co-operative principle allows people to assume that the speaker is using the strongest form of evidence available to them. That means there is an assumption that a hyperlink will go through to a relevant, high-quality source document. Flouting this is at the heart of the activity of rickrolling - making people think they are following a trust-worthy link, but taking them to the the music video for Rick Astley’s song "Never Gonna Give You Up".
Hyperlinks with anchor text are literally hypertext within the mechanisms of the code, but they also act as a hypertext in that they add to the meaning of the text with what they have scope over. We can see this at it’s maximally-bizarre in this post I wrote in 2016 when the automatic posting service for the Twitter account of an Australian magazine stopped including the links for a few days. Posts like these, without hyperlinks, just come across as creepy:
did a meteor hit Queensland last night? [text in tweet screencap above]
Baby born without eyes
Iconic ice block of our youth GONE
The hyperlink, and the knowledge there is additional supporting information for the claims made, add an important element to the pragmatic stance-taking in online discourse. The effect of this pragmatic function can be affected in hypertext linking by the relationship between the hyperlink and the anchor text.
The syntax of hyperlinks
As you know because you’ve spent the last two decades reading websites, hyperlinks can be embedded in a string of text. The relationship between the anchor text and the hyperlink is the last thing I want to discuss, not because it’s the least interesting, but because I think it’s the topic that needs the most quantification and a systematic approach (and I’m hoping that writing this post kills any urge I have to do that work).
I often spend an additional moment pondering which string of text I’ll affix a hyperlink to. I also have strong intuitions sometimes that someone has not given a hyperlink it’s appropriate scope. Usually for basic nouns it’s pretty straightforward, but linking within a very phrase, or when you’re pointing people towards another thing to read in the running text, it becomes more of an art form.
The choice of whether to include a hyperlink or not is an initial choice that ties back to the pragmatic weight of the syntactic choice. Then there’s some variation, choosing to add a hyperlink over a very long scope can draw emphasis to a large chunk of text. Or if you want to indicate a multiplicity of sources, see for example the final sentence of this paragraph in a Wired column from Gretchen McCulloch, where each word in the final sentence is its own hyperlink to a different location to indicate there are many sources to support her argument:
[text: Four is the magic number in part because of cognitive limitations—our brains have a hard time mentalizing, or keeping track of everyone's mental states, above four participants. But in video calls, the technology prevents us from splitting, so we're forced to mentalize too high. The result? That much-lamented Zoom fatigue.]
Hyperlinks might even be influencing the way we write English online. Emily Bender shared the following couple of tweets with a screenshot of some text from a university email.
Reading some documentation about mask policy at my campus (for the unlikely eventuality that I'll go there in person at some point...) and I was struck by how awkward (maybe ungrammatical) the sentence with the underlined phrase is here. >>
[Relevant text, hyperlink indicated by square bracket: WHEN ARE CLOTH FACE COVERINGS NEEDED? Face coverings are [required at the UW] to be worn indoors when other people are present; this includes common areas, such as hallways, stairways, restrooms and elevators.]
So now I'm wondering: was that odd order produced so that "required at the UW" would be a substring that could be hyperlinked to the UW's mask policy? And if so, is the practice of hyperlinking putting subtle pressure on languages & slowly changing word order possibilities?
Here the sentence appears to be presented so that the author could have a clear string of relevant anchor text for a hyperlink.
This makes me wonder if hyperlinks can be used as a way to investigate people’s intuitions about constituency. Do hyperlinks scope over anchor text in a way that replicates what we know from other constituency tests? I feel like I have complicated feelings about the inclusion of the determiner at the start of a noun phrase and whether it fits into the scope of the hyperlink or not.
Update (Feb 24 2021): in 2011 Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine gave a presentation answering my question about constituency! You can find the slides for the the talk on Mitcho’s website. He performed a corpus analysis of 375,000 hyperlinks on MetaFilter, and found that many hyperlinks conform to English constituency. Those that didn’t showed similarities that indicated there was something about argument structure or pragmatics that was clearly influencing people’s hyperlinking choices.
A million things I’ll never get around to
So, it turned out I did have a lot of thoughts about hyperlinks. Many of them are only evidenced by my intuitions. I don’t know if I’ll ever get the opportunity to dig deeper on this. It’s also worth being explicit about the fact that everything I’ve discussed above is framed entirely around my English-centric experience of the World Wide Web, and I’m sure there a whole lot of interesting topics about the use of hyperlinks in other languages I haven’t even begun to consider. I have such an affection for the mechanics of hyperlinking, the way it was an exercise in trust as the web grew, and how it’s an exercise in trust every time we click.
References
de Haan, Ferdinand. 2001. The Cognitive Basis of Visual Evidentials. In Alan Cienki, Barbara J. Luka and Smith, Michael B. (eds.), Conceptual and Discourse Factors in Linguistic Structure, 91-106. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Gawne, Lauren. (2015). The reported speech evidential particle in Lamjung Yolmo. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, 38(2), 292–318.
Michael, Lev. (2012). Nanti self-quotation: Implications for the pragmatics of reported speech and evidentiality. Pragmatics and Society, 3(2), 321-357.
Cite this blog post
All original content on Superlinguo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. If this post has inspired you to think and write about hyperlinks, please let me know! You can also cite this blog post:
Gawne, Lauren. 2021. The linguistics of hyperlinks. Superlinguo. <Link> Accessed DATE.
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Lingthusiasm Episode 59: Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Theory of Mind
Let's say I show you and our friend Gavagai a box of chocolates, and then Gav leaves the room, and I show you that the box actually contains coloured pencils. (Big letdown, sorry.) When Gav comes back in the room a minute later, and we've closed the box again, what are they going to think is in the box?
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about Theory of Mind -- our ability to keep track of what other people are thinking, even when it's different from what we know ourselves. We talk about the highly important role of gossip in the development of language, reframing how we introduce people to something they haven't heard of yet, and ways of synchronizing mental states across groups of people, from conferences to movie voiceovers.
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here
Announcements:
This month’s bonus episode is about some of the linguistically interesting fiction we've been reading lately! We talk about the challenges of communicating with sentient plants (from the plant's perspective) in Semiosis by Sue Burke, communicating with aliens by putting babies in pods (look, it was the 1980s) in Suzette Haden Elgin's classic Native Tongue, communicating with humans on a sailing ship using a sorta 19th century proto-internet in Courtney Milan's The Devil Comes Courting, and taking advantage of the difficulty of translation in communicating poetry across cultures in A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine.
Join us on Patreon to listen to this and 53 other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can discuss your favourite linguistically interesting fiction with other language nerds!
Here are links mentioned in this episode:
Wikipedia entry for Theory of Mind
Wikipedia entry for the Sally-Anne Theory of Mind test
Various Theory of Mind tests you can do with children
Do 15-Month-Old Infants Understand False Beliefs?
Theory of Mind in ravens
Theory of Mind in chimps
Wikipedia entry for Dunbar’s number
Evidentiality in Yolmo - Lingthusiasm Episode 32: You heard about it but I was there - Evidentiality
Definitions and Examples of Psychological Verbs
xkcd Lucky 10,000 comic
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Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
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Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production manager is Liz McCullough, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
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