SIL talk by Jenneke van der Wal (Leiden University)

Mapping Linguistic Epistemicity

It is a well-observed crosslinguistic fact that markers of evidentiality overlap with other concepts of speaker and hearer knowledge, such as mirativity or epistemic modality. To illustrate, the particle kamaŋ (1) indicates that the speaker has witnessed an event (evidentiality), as well as unexpectedness for the addressee (mirativity).

Fur (Nilo-Saharan, Waag 2010:260, adapted)

1. D-íí-ŋ             bára         kamaŋ   ʔέla.
   sg-2sg-gen  brother   ev             3sg.come.pfv
   ‘Your brother has really come.’ [I have seen him; this may surprise you]

Such fuzzy boundaries are found between all ‘categories’ of evidentiality, engagement, egophoricity, epistemic modality, mirativity, givenness, and contrast. This suggests that they form one conceptual space (cf. Aikhenvald’s 2021 ‘Web of knowledge’). How is that space of intersubjective epistemicity organised? In this talk, I present the MapLE project (NWO Vici), in which we try to go beyond the categories and explore how different languages group different aspects of epistemicity (and what that may tell us about human language and conceptualisation).