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Evidentiality and the Structure of Speech Acts

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Evidentiality and the Structure of Speech Acts © 2010 Sarah E. Murray EVIDENTIALITY AND THE STRUCTURE OF SPEECH ACTS by SARAH E. MURRAY A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Linguistics written under the direction of Maria Bittner and approved by Maria Bittner Roger Schwarzschild Matthew Stone Jeroen Groenendijk New Brunswick, New Jersey October 2010 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Evidentiality and the Structure of Speech Acts by SARAH E. MURRAY Dissertation Director: Maria Bittner Many languages grammatically mark evidentiality, i.e., the source of information. In assertions, evidentials indicate the source of information of the speaker while in questions they indicate the expected source of information of the addressee. This dissertation examines the semantics and pragmatics of evidentiality and illocutionary mood, set within formal theories of meaning and discourse. The empirical focus is the evidential system of Cheyenne (Algonquian: Montana), which is analyzed based on several years of fieldwork by the author. In Cheyenne, evidentials are part of the illocutionary mood paradigm. Based on this grammatical system and crosslinguistic data in the literature, I propose a new theory of evidentials. I argue that evidentials contribute not-at-issue content, which cannot be directly challenged or denied. This content is added directly to the common ground, without negotiation. In contrast, at-issue content, the main point of a sentence, is proposed to the common ground, up for negotiation. This analysis of evidentials implies a more articulated theory of assertion and other speech acts. In particular, I argue that all speech acts are structured into three components: presentation of the at-issue proposition, a non-negotiable update that directly restricts the common ground, and a negotiable update that imposes structure on the common ground. I implement this proposal in an update semantics with ii individual, modal, and propositional discourse referents. The distinction between at- issue and not-at-issue information comes out as an instance of grammatical centering in the modal domain. The presentation of the at-issue proposition is modeled as the introduction of a propositional discourse referent. This predicts that only the at-issue proposition can be referred to in subsequent discourse, and the non-challengeability of the evidential falls out as a special case of propositional anaphora. The proposed analysis can be extended to evidentials and related phenomena in other languages. While there are real crosslinguistic differences in the behavior of evidentials, there are also many commonalities. The proposed analysis captures the properties that all evidential systems share, but is fine-grained enough to account for variation. On this analysis, evidentials crosslinguistically form a natural semantic class. iii Acknowledgments My interest in evidentials began at Wayne State University in a typology class with Martha Ratliff. She gave me a grammar of Tariana (Aikhenvald 2003), which has an entire chapter dedicated to evidentials, and I was instantly captivated. I am grateful to many people at Wayne, and at The LINGUIST List, for their support early in my career: Ljiljana Progovac, Susan Vineberg, Tony Aristar, Helen Aristar- Dry, Martha Ratliff, Geoffrey Nathan, Margaret Winters, my classmates in linguistics and philosophy, and all of my friends and coworkers at LINGUIST. Susan deserves special thanks for encouraging me to go to Rutgers for graduate school. At Rutgers a few years later, after trying to convince several other people to study evidentials, I finally got the opportunity to do so myself in a semantics seminar on indirect reports with Maria Bittner. Maria's seminars are rigorous and infinitely rewarding, and I have never learned so much as from her hands-on approach to logic. She encouraged me to pursue my interest in fieldwork, and helped me to understand the symbiotic relationship that can exist between fieldwork and theory. As chair of my dissertation, she has looked over innumerable drafts, always with suggestions for improvement, and has helped me through some difficult spots. From Semantics II in my second semester, Maria has been a teacher, advisor, mentor, and friend. My first semantics class ever was in my first semester at Rutgers: Semantics I with Roger Schwarzschild. That class changed my life. Before the class, I knew I loved logic and language; afterwards, I knew I loved semantics. In the years since, iv Roger has been a constant presence in my academic life, from seminars to meetings to research groups to potlucks. He has the keen ability to see the essential properties of a proposal, and to ask difficult questions. Roger always challenged me to work out the details of my assumptions, and I always learned a lot in the process. Also in my first semester at Rutgers was my Cognitive Science Proseminar, where I first heard from Matthew Stone about his work. I didn't really know what he was talking about, but I knew I wanted to. Since then, my conversations with Matthew have had a substantial effect on my view of semantics and interdisciplinary research. He has always carefully read and considered my work, and consistently has sharp and insightful comments. Over the years, I have greatly benefited from his guidance and pioneering perspective, as well as his personal support and encouragement. I first met Jeroen Groenendijk at the 2007 Amsterdam Colloquium and got to know him while auditing a seminar of his on Inquisitive Semantics at NYU. Several of the ideas proposed in this dissertation were inspired by that seminar, in particular the idea that, if assertions are proposals to update the common ground, as in Groenendijk and Roelofsen(2009), then perhaps some information is directly added to the common ground. I have always enjoyed our meetings, especially our collective wonderings about the application of various logics to various natural language phenomena. Another person who has had a sizable effect on the content of this dissertation is Jason Stanley. Though not an official member, Jason was a de facto member of my committee. He also supervised an independent study I completed as part of my Graduate Certificate in Cognitive Science. We read much of the philosophical work on epistemic modality and discussed how the various issues were related to the study of evidentiality. This project fused itself with my dissertation project, and has greatly refined the way that I see many of the issues surrounding evidentiality. This work has directly benefitted from conversations with many others over the years, including Chris Barker, David Beaver, Adrian Brasoveanu, Veneeta Dayal, v Martina Faller, Carlos Fasola, Jane Grimshaw, John Hawthorne, Hans Kamp, Wayne Leman, Ernie Lepore, Richard Littlebear, Salvador Mascarenhas, Lisa Matthewson, Floris Roelofsen, Ken Safir, Chung-chieh Shan, Yael Sharvit, William Starr, Rich Thomason, and Judith Tonhauser. I am also grateful for the feedback from audi- ences at SALT 19, PEPA 1 & 2, SULA5, the Rutgers Semantics Reading Group, the Group for Interdisciplinary Research in Semantics at Rutgers, The University of Siena, The University of Texas at Arlington, The University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Cornell University, and in Maria Bittner's Seminar on Speech Acts. The vigorous and stimulating interdisciplinary language community at Rutgers, facilitated by Ernie Lepore and the Center for Cognitive Science, has made Rutgers an invaluable place to learn and study. I would like to thank several people for their role in this community during my time here: Mark Baker, Jose Camacho, Veneeta Dayal, Charles Gallistel, Rochel Gelman, Thony Gillies, Jane Grimshaw, Shigeto Kawa- hara, Jeff King, Paul de Lacy, Ernie Lepore, Alan Prince, Mary Rigdon, Ken Safir, Liliana Sanchez, Roger Schwarzschild, Chung-chieh Shan, Jason Stanley, Matthew Stone, Kristen Syrett, Bruce Tesar, Brian Weatherson, Dean Zimmerman, Daniel Altshuler, Josh Armstrong, Luvell Anderson, Adrian Brasoveanu, Sam Cumming, Tom Donaldson, Carlos Fasola, Gabe Greenberg, Erik Hoversten, Michael Johnson, Slavica Kochovska, Todor Koev, Xiao Li, Karen Lewis, Zak Miller, Alex Morgan, Jenny Nado, Iris Oved, Carlotta Pavese, Jessica Rett, Adam Sennet, Karen Shan- ton, William Starr, Sue Cosentino, Patty McGuire, and JoAnn Meli, Joanna Stoehr, various RuCCs visitors, and many others I'm sure I have forgotten. This dissertation would not have been possible if it weren't for my Cheyenne consultants and many other people in the Cheyenne community. Thank you for your friendship and support, your collaboration, and our discussions of Cheyenne. In particular, I would like to thank Ve'kes_ohnestoohe (Dr. Richard Littlebear), Otseohtse'e (Marie Sanchez), Mokee'e (Louise Fisher), Hoveo'ke'h_atse(Floyd Fisher), vi Ma'etomona'e (Maretha Charette), Kovaahe (Wayne Leman), Verda and Raymond King, George Elkshoulder, Mina Seminole, Linwood Tallbull, Conrad Fisher, Sharon Rathbun, Bertha Brown, Zane, Sandy, and Bently Spang, Robert Shotgun, Alvera Cook, the other immersion camp teachers, my classmates in the Cheyenne language classes that I have audited, and everyone at Chief Dull Knife College. I would also like to thank Cori Thatcher, Noah and Eva Shaltes, the American Indian Housing Initiative crew, David Wilson, Carol Ward, and William Starr. N´e´a'_eˇsemeno. I gratefully acknowledge the financial support that I have received, both for my graduate program
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