LINGUIST List 33.3180
Wed Oct 19 2022
Calls: General Linguistics, Pragmatics, Semantics/Greece
Editor for this issue: Everett Green <everettlinguistlist.org>
Date: 17-Oct-2022
From: Karolina Grzech <karolina.grzech
ling.su.se>
Subject: Expanding the boundaries of epistemicity: epistemic modality, evidentiality, and beyond
E-mail this message to a friend Full Title: Expanding the boundaries of epistemicity: epistemic modality, evidentiality, and beyond
Date: 29-Aug-2023 - 01-Sep-2023
Location: National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, Greece
Contact Person: Karolina Grzech
Meeting Email:
< click here to access email >
Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Pragmatics; Semantics
Call Deadline: 10-Nov-2022
Meeting Description:
This proposal promotes the view that evidentials and other forms of epistemic marking, i.e. epistemics, are a species of deictics, which require an analytical focus on the context of use, as well as on the relation between propositions and the speech-act participants in terms of knowledge representation and knowledge attribution. Following from this, the challenge of determining what meaning is encoded by epistemics, and what is implied by their use, must be met by approaching their analysis from the point of view of interaction and discourse. This workshop aims to explore the use and meaning of epistemics, focusing on three main analytical challenges.
The first challenge is the context-sensitivity of epistemic forms. If the context of their use is disregarded, the semantics of individual forms is near impossible to define. The context-sensitivity of epistemics is highlighted by the fact that their use and meaning are affected both by linguistic categories they co-occur with, such as person and tense (e.g. Sun 2018), and by discourse-level phenomena like genre and modality (written/spoken language, cf. e.g. Nuckolls & Michael 2014). This sensitivity stems from the fact that the semantic and pragmatic properties of epistemics concern the interactional dynamics of the speech situation and the respective stances of the speech-act participants. Variation according to these contextual parameters has often been noted in the literature, but at the same time, it has been downplayed in favor of decontextualized exemplifications that permit neat definitions and paradigms. However, to say that epistemics are sensitive to context is only a starting point, and in order to make progress in the study of epistemicity, it is necessary to determine what aspects of the context are relevant for their analysis.
The second challenge in the study of epistemicity concerns the comparability of forms and systems between languages, i.e. the cross-linguistic comparison of epistemics. As we gain access to a growing number of descriptions of epistemic marking systems from non-European, indigenous languages, it is becoming increasingly clear that the traditional conception of epistemicity as subsuming only evidentiality and epistemic modality (cf. Boye 2012) must be amended to include a much more complex picture; one that emerges from these growing data sets. Comparatively new notions like egophoricity (cf. Floyd et al. 2018) and engagement (Evans et al. 2018) should also be possible to relate to the more established notions like epistemic modality and evidentiality. Do these distinct labels and the definitions that they house allow for a meaningful comparison of forms encountered in descriptive data, or are they disparate grammatical concepts? Again, it is by looking at the contextualized use of the investigated forms that such comparisons are made possible and relevant.
The third challenge is to relate data-driven analyses of epistemics that emphasize aspects of interaction and discourse to traditional analyses of similar forms. The established definitions of epistemic modals and evidentials are by and large couched in an analytical framework that emphasizes truth-relations and the justification of knowledge (cf. Willett 1988; Aikhenvald 2004). Such definitions have mainly focused on determining whether evidentials are modal or non-modal (cf. e.g. Faller 2002; Matthewson 2011) disregarding other aspects of their meaning. They also advocate a stand-alone analysis of forms that should be possible to retrieve void of any contextual cues. Recent proposals, on the other hand, argue for the necessity of contextual transparency in the analysis of epistemics and question the very possibility of analyzing these in an objective, de-contextualized sense. Are these seemingly distinct modes of analysis compatible, or are they at odds with respect to what they claim?
Call for Papers:
In the light of these three challenges for the study of epistemics, this workshop aims to explore the following questions:
- How can pragmatics, conversation analysis and interactional linguistics inform the analysis of evidentials and other epistemics?
- What aspects of interaction are relevant for the description and analysis of epistemics? Can they be modelled and theorized, and if so, how?
- What role do sociolinguistic factors play in the analysis of epistemics? Which of these factors are most relevant in accounting for how epistemics are used?
- What kind of data is important for the description and analysis of epistemics?
We invite contributions approaching the above questions and issues from theoretical, methodological and descriptive perspectives. The contributions can deal with any language, and with any epistemic category, and they should focus on the analysis of epistemic systems in the context of natural or naturalistic, interactive language use.
The objective of the workshop is to bring together researchers interested in the interactional aspects of epistemicity. Through the discussion of different epistemic categories such as evidentiality, egophoricity, mirativity, engagement, etc., in the context of their use in interaction, we hope to be able to formulate directions for future research on epistemicity as an interactional and/or deictic category. We also aim to contribute to the development of an empirically-grounded theory of epistemicity which would be able to account for the context-related characteristics of knowledge-related expressions, which the currently available theory treats as negligible idiosyncrasies or ‘pragmatic extensions’ (cf. Aikhenvald 2004) of allegedly context-independent epistemic meanings.
Please send the provisional abstracts (max. 300 words) to karolina.grzech
ling.su.se or henrik.bergqvist
gu.se by November 10th, 2022.
References:
Aikhenvald, A. 2004. Evidentiality. Oxford: OUP.
Boye, K. 2012. Epistemic Meaning, A Crosslinguistic and Functional-Cognitive Study. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Evans, N., H. Bergqvist & L. San Roque. 2018. The grammar of engagement I: framework and initial exemplification. Language and Cognition 10(1). 110–140.
Faller, M. 2002. Semantics and Pragmatics of Evidentials in Cuzco Quechua. Stanford.
Floyd, S., E. Norcliffe & L. San Roque (eds.). 2018. Egophoricity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Matthewson, L. 2011. On apparently non-modal evidentials. In O. Bonami & P. Cabredo Hofherr (eds.), Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics 8, 333–358.
Nuckolls, J. & L. Michael (eds.). 2014. Evidentiality in interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Sun, J. T.-S. 2018. Evidentials and person. In A. Aikhenvald (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Evidentiality, 47–64. Oxford: OUP.
Willett, T. 1988. A Cross-Linguistic Survey of the Grammaticization of Evidentiality. Studies in Language 12(1). 51–97
Page Updated: 19-Oct-2022