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Evidence from Evidentials UBCWPL University of British Columbia Working Papers in Linguistics Evidence from Evidentials Edited by: Tyler Peterson and Uli Sauerland September 2010 Volume 28 ii Evidence from Evidentials Edited by: Tyler Peterson and Uli Sauerland The University of British Columbia Working Papers in Linguistics Volume 28 September 2010 UBCWPL is published by the graduate students of the University of British Columbia. We feature current research on language and linguistics by students and faculty of the department, and we are the regular publishers of two conference proceedings: the Workshop on Structure and Constituency in Languages of the Americas (WSCLA) and the International Conference on Salish and Neighbouring Languages (ICSNL). If you have any comments or suggestions, or would like to place orders, please contact : UBCWPL Editors Department of Linguistics Totem Field Studios 2613 West Mall V6T 1Z4 Tel: 604 822 4256 Fax 604 822 9687 E-mail: <[email protected]> Since articles in UBCWPL are works in progress, their publication elsewhere is not precluded. All rights remain with the authors. iii Cover artwork by Lester Ned Jr. Contact: Ancestral Native Art Creations 10704 #9 Highway Compt. 376 Rosedale, BC V0X 1X0 Phone: (604) 793-5306 Fax: (604) 794-3217 Email: [email protected] iv TABLE OF CONTENTS TYLER PETERSON, ROSE-MARIE DÉCHAINE, AND ULI SAUERLAND ...............................1 Evidence from Evidentials: Introduction JASON BROWN ................................................................................................................9 Evidentiality and polarity in Yorùbá JACKIE C.K. CHEUNG, MICHAEL LEUNG, AMIE YANG, DIANA XING, AND JANE TSE ...29 Variation in Restrictions on Multiple Evidential Markers in Japanese by Speaker Age GENNA COHEN, CARLENE CHUAKAW, AND JOSEPHINE SMALL ....................................41 Waking the Language of Dreamers: A Survey of Evidentiality in Dreams DREW GILMOUR, ASHLEIGH GONZALES, AND MEAGAN LOUIE ....................................75 Evidentials and Parasitic Irony: Activating the Illocution-Proposition Distinction PATRICK LITTELL, LISA MATTHEWSON AND TYLER PETERSON....................................89 On the Semantics of Conjectural Questions ERIC MCCREADY........................................................................................................105 Evidential Universals TYLER PETERSON........................................................................................................129 Examining the Mirative and Nonliteral Uses of Evidentials EVA-MARIA REMBERGER ...........................................................................................161 The Evidential Shift of WANT MATHIAS SCHENNER ..................................................................................................183 Evidentials in Complex Sentences: Foundational Issues and Data from Turkish and German MAGDALENA SCHWAGER ...........................................................................................221 On what has been said in Tagalog: Reportative daw OLGA STERIOPOLO......................................................................................................247 Expressivity in Russian AISLIN STOTT, MORGAN SMITH, TYLER CHANG, AND ALICIA BOND .........................263 Which -miş is MIŞ?: Turkish indirectivity and negative scope Evidence from Evidentials Introduction Tyler Peterson1, Rose-Marie Déchaine2, and Uli Sauerland3 1Leiden University, 2University of British Columbia, and 3ZAS Berlin Broadly speaking, evidentiality is the expression of the source of evidence for a proposition. Cross-linguistically, different morphological means are used to express evidentiality. For example, in English, evidentiality can be expressed by adverbial expressions (1), by modals (2), or by verbs (3). (1) Evidentiality expressed by adverbs: a. Actually, it’s raining. CONTEXT: speaker has direct perceptual evidence that it is raining b. Apparently, it’s raining. CONTEXT: speaker has indirect inferential evidence that it is raining (e.g. speaker observes someone coming in with a wet umbrella) c. Reportedly, it’s raining. CONTEXT: speaker has indirect hearsay evidence that it is raining (2) Evidentiality expressed by modal: It must be raining. CONTEXT: speaker has indirect inferential evidence that it is raining (e.g. speaker observes that street is wet and infers that it has rained) (3) Evidentiality expressed by verbs: a. I hear that it’s raining. (i.) CONTEXT: speaker has direct perceptual evidence that it is raining (e.g. speaker hears the rain hitting the roof). (ii.) CONTEXT: speaker has indirect hearsay evidence that it is raining (e.g. someone has told speaker that it is raining). c 2010 Tyler Peterson, Rose-Marie D´echaine, and Uli Sauerland In: Tyler Peterson, and Uli Sauerland (eds.) Evidence from Evidentials. pp. 1{7. University of British Columbia Working Papers in Linguistics, volume 28. Vancouver, Canada, 2010. 2 Peterson, D´echaine, and Sauerland b. It looks like it’s raining. CONTEXT: speaker has visual evidence that it is raining (e.g. speaker sees people walking in with wet boots). c. Lucy told me that it’s raining. CONTEXT: speaker has indirect hearsay evidence that it is raining. In other languages modals aspectual morphology (Bulgarian, Turkish, Chechen, etc.) can take on evidential meaning and in some cases develop into an independent morphological paradigm. In Eastern dialects of Bulgarian, the ‘perfect of evidentiality’ (glossed as ‘PE’) has a reportative evidential interpretation and is distinguished from the aspectual perfect by auxiliary drop: (4) Bulgarian (Sauerland & Schenner 2007: (4)) Todor imal ˇcervena kosa Todor has-PE red hair “Todor has red hair.” CONTEXT: The speaker was told that Todor has red hair. Finally some languages have specialized evidential morphology in the form of ver- bal affixes or particles (Japanese, Quechua, Tibetan, etc.). For example, the reportative marker -si in Quechua indicates that the speaker heard the information expressed in the claim from someone else: (5) Quechua (Faller 2002) para-sha-n-si rain-PROG-3-si “It’s raining.” CONTEXT: speaker was told that it is raining The analysis of evidentials is a challenge for syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, but much progress has been made over the last decade or so. On the one hand, the ana- lytic tools for investigating the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of evidentials have progressed to a point where they permit a granularity of analysis that wasn’t possible before. On the other hand, we expect that, as more in-depth studies of evidentials in differ- ent languages are conducted, this will lead to a refinement of the models used to analyze evidentials. Given the diversity of evidential expression, a question of overarching interest is whether there are any generalizations that hold for the conceptual category evidentiality across languages and the various forms evidentiality is expressed. At present there is little evidence for universal properties that could be glimpsed from basic descriptions of eviden- tial expressions (cf. Aikenvald 2004). However, once a more fine-grained understanding of Introduction 3 aspects of evidentiality is adopted the picture may change. For example, the English indi- rect evidential it looks like in 3 does not share the scopal properties of the Bulgarian perfect of evidentiality in 4: Namely, only the former can take scope under negation. However, we don’t know at present whether the correlation between scope and verbal/aspectual evi- dentiality holds more generally. We conclude that our general perspective on evidentiality is still justified, despite all the variation observed. What is needed then is a more fine- grained understanding of evidentiality in individual languages and a renewed investigation of cross-linguistic issues based upon this understanding. Investigating evidentiality forces us to pay attention to how form, meaning and use integrated. This means that the following domains must be taken into account when developing a model of evidentiality: Morphosyntax (form): How is evidentiality encoded? Are there any morphosyntactic regularities in the expression of evidentiality, either within a language or across lan- guages? What is the significance of the absence of overt coding, i.e. can unmarked propositions have evidential force? Semantic (meaning): What does evidentiality express? Does evidentiality reduce to a special kind of epistemic modality? Or is evidentiality a primitive in the grammar? Or is evidentiality the side-effect of the convergence of a number of different fac- tors relating to knowledge base and perspective? Do we require a formal theory of evidentiality? Pragmatics (use): How are evidentials used? What felicity conditions constrain their context-of-use? Which presuppositions (if any) are attached to evidentials. How are evidentials used to convey meanings at the speech act level such as mirativity and irony? The Papers The papers in this volume undertake analyses which focus on different aspects of the syn- tax, the semantics, and the pragmatics of evidentiality. The languages under investigation include Plains Cree (Cohen et al.), English (Remberger, Gilmour et al.), German (Rem- berger, Schenner), Gitksan (Littell et al., Peterson), Japanese (Cheung et al., McCready), St’át’imcets (Littell et al.), Quechua (McCready), Russian (Steriopolo), Tagalog (Schwa- ger, Cohen et al.), Thompson (Littell et al.), Turkish (Peterson, Stott et al.), and Yorùbá (Brown). Syntax For the syntactic analysis of
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