Doctoral Dissertation Research: On the Semantics of Evidentials

University Of Connecticut, Storrs CT

Investigators

Abstract

A central question in theoretical linguistics is what is a possible human language. What properties do all languages share and how much can languages differ from each other? The only way to adequately answer this question is to investigate the structure of as many of the world's actual languages as is possible. Consequently, there is an urgent need to study those languages that have not yet been the subject of significant study. This dissertation project will provide a comprehensive description and analysis of the evidential system in such an understudied language. Evidentials are markers that indicate the source of evidence for a piece of information reported in a sentence. For instance, in an English sentence such as "Mary went to the party, I heard," the source of evidence is a heard report, as is made explicit with "I heard". Languages like English do not have dedicated markers (such as verb endings) to indicate sources of evidence, but many other languages do have such markers. The documentation of evidential markers will provide the source material that will be analyzed in a doctoral dissertation. Broader impacts include a publicly available deposit of the recordings and transcriptions in a digital archive, as well as the linguistic training of linguists and language instructors. This dissertation project will document and analyze the evidential system of an understudied language, thus contributing an important data point for cross-linguistic comparisons of evidential systems. This project will investigate the distribution of the three evidential markers, namely the direct evidential, the indirect evidential, and the reportative evidential, and provide a semantic analysis. More generally, this project aims to locate a specific system of evidentials within the wider spectrum of evidential systems that have been identified cross-linguistically. The typological novelty of this system is two-fold. First, evidentiality is linked to focus marking. In particular, the direct evidential indicates which constituent is focalized, and determines how focus alternatives are evaluated. This marker will be likened to focus sensitive elements (e.g., English 'even') and discourse particles (e.g., German 'ja'). Within the studied language, it is possible to have more than one evidential marker in the same clause. This is rare among languages and thus relevant to tease apart different analyses of evidentials, as well as to establish generalizations regarding what combinations of evidentials can co-occur in the same sentence. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.