Events
SIL talk: Jenneke van der Wal
Speaker: Jenneke van der Wal
Title: Mapping Linguistic Epistemicity
Date/Time: 25 September, 4pm
Place: Trans 10, room 0.19 / MS Teams
Abstract
It is a well-observed crosslinguistic fact that markers of evidentiality overlap with other concepts of speaker and hearer knowledge, such as mirativity or epistemic modality. To illustrate, the particle kamaŋ (1) indicates that the speaker has witnessed an event (evidentiality), as well as unexpectedness for the addressee (mirativity).
Fur (Nilo-Saharan, Waag 2010:260, adapted)
- D-íí-ŋ bára kamaŋ ʔέla.
sg-2sg-gen brother ev 3sg.come.pfv
‘Your brother has really come.’ [I have seen him; this may surprise you]
Such fuzzy boundaries are found between all ‘categories’ of evidentiality, engagement, egophoricity, epistemic modality, mirativity, givenness, and contrast. This suggests that they form one conceptual space (cf. Aikhenvald’s 2021 ‘Web of knowledge’). How is that space of intersubjective epistemicity organised? In this talk, I present the MapLE project (NWO Vici), in which we try to go beyond the categories and explore how different languages group different aspects of epistemicity (and what that may tell us about human language and conceptualisation).
If you wish to attend and are not in the Teams, please contact the SIL organizers