The Semantics of Evidentiality and Epistemic Modality in Avar

Chapter 6 The Semantics of Evidentiality and Epistemic Modality in Avar

Diana Forker

1 Introduction

Avar (ISO 639–3 ava) is one of the larger Nakh-Daghestanian (East Caucasian) languages. The number of Avar speakers can be estimated at around 800,000.1 Traditionally, Avars live in the central and western parts of Daghestan, and there are also Avar communities in Georgia and in northern Azerbaijan. In the last 150 years many Avars have migrated to Turkey2 and to various parts of Russia. Avar can be roughly divided into a northern and a southern dialectal group. Literary Avar has been developed from an Avar koiné called bolmac’ (‘common language’, from bo ‘people, society, community’ + -l genitive case and mac’ ‘language’) used by speakers of northern varieties for interdialectal communica- tion. Avar also served as lingua franca for other Daghestanian ethnic groups such as Andic and Tsezic people and has left many traces in their languages. Avar is one of the 14 official languages of Daghestan. It is taught in schools; there are a number of newspapers and journals, radio and TV programs and nowadays many Internet sites (Wikipedia in Avar, two Avar corpora,3 Radio Free Europe in Avar,4 etc.). Important publications on the Avar language are, among others, Bokarev (1949), Saidov (1967), Charachidzé (1981), Alekseev &

1 According to the 2010 census, 844,513 people in the Russian Federation name Avar as their mother tongue, but only 831,488 say that they are ethnically Avar (http://www.gks.ru/free_ doc/new_site/perepis2010/croc/perepis_itogi1612.htm). The difference might be due to the fact that many speakers of Andic and Tsezic languages learn Avar as a subject called ‘mother tongue’ in school and therefore perhaps indicate Avar as their ‘mother tongue’ in the census. 2 The only description of Avar in a common European language other than Russian is Charachidzé’s (1981) grammar of Hunzaq Avar (that is close to Standard Avar) as spoken by migrants in Turkey in the 1960s and 1970s. 3 http://baltoslav.eu/avar/ and http://web-corpora.net/AvarCorpus/. 4 http://www.radioerkenli.com/.

Ataev (1998), Madieva (1967, 1981, 2000), Mallaeva (2007), Alekseev et al. (2014) and Gimbatov (Ms). In this paper, I will analyze evidentiality and epistemic modality in Standard Literary Avar based on data from the literature, elicitation and internet sources. The data is transliterated from the Avar Cyrillic orthography (thus, certain phonemic contrasts that are not marked in the orthography are also not transliterated). From a morphological point of view, Avar is agglutinative with some ele- ments of fusion. It has four grammatical cases (absolutive, ergative, dative, genitive) and 15 spatial cases. Nouns can be divided into three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter) that are usually not marked on the nouns them- selves but show up through gender agreement on many verbs, adjectives, certain pronouns and some other agreement targets. The agreement affixes, which can appear as prefixes or suffixes, and very occasionally as infixes, are w (masculine singular), j (feminine singular), b (neuter singular) and l/r (plural). There is no person agreement in Standard Avar (but see Section 3.3 below). The language has a rich inventory of verb forms. The finite synthetic verb forms are the present with the suffixes -(u)la / -una), the future with the suffixes -(i)la / -ina and the aorist -(a)na. Many tense/aspect/mood oppositions are expressed by means of analytic verb forms. Non-finite verb forms include participles, general and specialized converbs, the infinitive (used as citation form in this paper and in all available dictionaries; suffix -ize / -ze / -ine) and the masdar (deverbal noun). A number of them (present participle, perfective converb, and infinitive) are used for the formation of analytic verb forms. With respect to the topic of this paper, evidentiality and epistemic modality, it is especially the past participle and the perfective converb that are of primary relevance.

2 Evidentiality in Avar

I follow the common definition of evidentiality as the linguistic encoding of the information source (cf. Aikhenvald 2004: 3) and the commonly assumed subdivisions within the realm of evidentiality between direct and indirect evi- dentials according to whether the information source of the speaker is direct because s/he attended the situation that s/he is referring to or whether the information source is indirect. Furthermore, we can distinguish various subtypes of indirect evidentiality such that we arrive at the following categories (Willett 1988; Aikhenvald 2004; Plungian 2010):