26.4375, Review: Anthropological Ling; Discourse; Pragmatics: Nuckolls, Michael (2014)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-26-4375. Mon Oct 05 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.4375, Review: Anthropological Ling; Discourse; Pragmatics: Nuckolls, Michael (2014)

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Date: Mon, 05 Oct 2015 17:38:20
From: Roxana Dinca [roxanamdinca at yahoo.com]
Subject: Evidentiality in Interaction

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/25/25-2821.html

EDITOR: Janis  Nuckolls
EDITOR: Lev  Michael
TITLE: Evidentiality in Interaction
SERIES TITLE: Benjamins Current Topics 63
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2014

REVIEWER: Roxana Magdalena Dinca, University of Bucharest

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

INTRODUCTION

“Evidentiality in Interaction” was published as a special issue of Pragmatics and Society (issue 3:2, 2012), and consists in six articles about the social and interactional properties of evidentiality. Recently, evidentiality has received more attention on its grammatical properties rather than on its social and interactional features. This volume puts together complementary research on evidential marking and grounds its social and interactional perspectives on data from diverse languages: Albanian, English, Garrwa (Pama-Nyungan, Australia), Huamalíes Quechua (Quechuan, Peru), Nanti (Arawak, Peru), and Pastaza Quichua (Quechuan, Ecuador). The analyses presented in this volume have been drawn from conversational analysis, ethnography of communication, theories of deixis and indexicality, and also from three overlapping lines of research: on grammar, semantics, and pragmatics. The target audience for the book is students and researchers with advanced background in linguistics and 
 with a special interest in the evidentiality and epistemic modality fields.

In the foreword, William Hanks presents the main directions of the interactional approach to evidentiality, and indicates the three families of effects related to pragmatic level of evidential marking: “Source of knowledge”, “Source of statement”, and “Interactional force”. He also discusses the conceptual proximity between deixis and evidentiality as a complementary or overlapping relation, presenting them as similar and, at the same time, as different concepts.

In the introduction of the volume, the editors provide a general overview of the topics discussed, and present the general linguistic basis of evidentiality and of evidential strategies, like whether “evidentiality as a cross-linguistic grammatical category should be defined narrowly as denoting source of information or whether it should be defined as denoting attitudes towards knowledge that also include epistemic modality” (p.15).

SUMMARY

The first article, “Enhancing national solidarity through the deployment of the verbal categories: How the Albanian Admirative participates in the construction of a reliable self and an unreliable other”, by Victor A. Friedman, presents the deployment of the Albanian admirative strategies and evidential particles to render either dubitative or neutral reports, based on data from the Kosovar electronic news. The idea is that this linguistic phenomenon played a significant role in the project of an independent Kosovo. After some information about geo-political and linguistic context, the author also presents some comparative linguistic facts of Albanian and Macedonian, and, at the end, he develops a socially informed pragmatic-linguistic analysis based on statistical usage of the admirative and evidential particles ‘kinse’ “allegedly” and ‘gjoja’ “supposedly” from the news sources (recorded between 1999 and 2000).

Janis Nuckolls, in his research “From quotative other to quotative self: Evidential usage in Pastaza Quichua”, examines the evidential particles and their uses in narratives in Pastaza Quichua, an Amazonian dialect of Ecuadorian Quechua. The morphological paradigm in Pastaza Quichua consists of three evidential enclitics: -mi, -shi, -cha. There are two perspectives in characterizing them: one is the perspective of the Quechua scholars, who insist on the evidential character of these suffixes, describing them as “encoding direct or eyewitnessed, indirect or hearsay, and conjectural knowledge on the part of the speaker” (p. 57); the other is the perspective of the author, who argues that “an adequate understanding of these suffixes must bring speaker subjectivity and deixis into the analytic framework” (p. 58). Analyzing direct and indirect evidentials -mi and -shi in personal experience narratives, the author highlights the idea that evidentials are used to convey speaker 
 subjectivity, rather than source of information. 

The chapter “Shifting voices, shifting worlds: Evidentiality, epistemic modality and speaker perspective in Quechua oral narrative” examines evidentiality and epistemic modality in Quechua narrative discourse. The author discusses the conceptual relation between evidentiality and epistemic modality, based on linguistic literature in this field (Boas 1938, Chafe and Nichols 1986, Mushin 2001, Aikhenvald 2004). The analysis is primarily based on the speaker perspective in interaction and it is built on Nuckolls’ innovative work on the relationship between evidentiality, deixis, and reported speech in Quechua discourse. The data used in this work is represented by an interesting  story, based on “supernatural situation in an Amerindian world which is the meeting in the forest between a man and a being which is seen at first merely as an animal or a person (…)” (Viveiros de Castro, 2006: 562). That story was told to the author by a Quechua speaking storyteller in the central 
 highlands of Peru. Howard presents the evidential and epistemic modal enclitics of Huamalies Quechua, the synopsis of the tale, and a description of the method of text transcription and the proper analysis. An important function of the evidential marker and epistemic modal is to shape grammatically the multiple speaker perspectives, in order to indicate shifts from one perspective to another (for example, the suffix -mi marks the voice of the “speaking self”, and -shi marks the voice of the “speaking other”).

Ilana Mushin analyses the evidential strategies in ordinary Garrwa conversation. The background of this chapter, ““Watching for witness”: Evidential strategies and epistemic authority in Garrwa conversation”, is an anthropological one, like the other chapters from the volume, and it takes into account knowledge and epistemic authority in Aboriginal societies. The author examines the evidential strategies (the use or the non-use of these strategies) adopted by Aboriginal Australians in social interaction in terms of negotiation of epistemic authority.  The data used in this research consists of conversations recorded during trips between 2000 and 2008 (audio and video recordings). 

The framework of the article ““Who knows best?”: Evidentiality and epistemic asymmetry in conversation” is conversation analysis. The author aims to point the way in which participants in one conversation “negotiate relative epistemic positioning through the use of particular practices of speaking” (p. 127). The social asymmetry entailed by another’s lack of knowledge is suggested when speakers express their certainty about claims. “Epistemic negotiations, achieved through turn-taking, sequential organization, and use of epistemic particles or verbs are embedded within other conversational particles such as recounting, complaining, or sympathizing” (p. 18).

In the last chapter of the volume (“Nanti self-quotation: Implications for the pragmatics of reported speech and evidentiality”), Lev Michael describes two quotation strategies employed by the speakers of Nanti. One strategy involves the grammaticalized quotative evidential, and the other strategy involves complement-taking verbs of saying. The analysis which considers these two strategies as premises examines the consequences of these expected pragmatic differences. Subsidiarily, the direction of this research is to show the importance of degree of grammaticalization in delimiting the evidential, on the one hand, and the importance of the distinction between epistemic modal and evidential marking “source of information”, on the other hand. The author focuses on a form of self-quotation, concurrent quotative framing (CQF), “in which a speaker quotes himself/herself as a way of individuating commitment to a position that contrasts with that of another speaker” (p. 18). The
  data is represented by the recordings of naturally-occurring communicative interactions among speakers of Nanti (a language of the Kampan sub-branch of the Arawak family).
 
EVALUATION

The relationship between evidentiality and epistemic modality has been studied in the linguistic literature from different points of view, including syntactic, semantic and pragmatic perspectives. This volume represents an important study in the field of evidentiality for two reasons. One reason is the general perspective adopted by the authors, namely social interaction. Evidential markers are presented in the discourse and conversational analysis, the main framework being the speaker perspective. The second reason is the richness of the linguistic data from different languages (Albanian, English, Garrwa, Huamalíes Quechua, Nanti, and Pastaza Quichua). The interpenetration of the linguistic and anthropological perspective gives the complexity and the complementary aspect of the articles presented in this book.

The volume succeeds in bringing together a set of thematically related articles on social functions of evidentiality and evidential strategies. The data constituting the empirical basis comes from naturally occurring conversations (in the articles written by the authors Friedman, Michael, Mushin), electronic news reports (Friedman), narrative of personal experiences (Nuckolls), and a myth (Howard).  The articles by Friedman, Nuckolls, and Howard analyze languages which have evidential paradigms, and the whole analysis bears on the ways in which evidential categories are used to express various voicing effects. The other three articles by Mushin, Sidnell and Michael treat the general topic of evidential strategies and recently grammaticalized evidentiality.  

This volume makes a significant contribution to theoretical representation in the study of evidentiality, taking into account the variety of pragmatics effects associated with it. Based on the work of Aikhenvald (2004), and adopting the narrow definition in which the grammaticalization of information source is the core and the limit of evidentiality, the study unifies the answers to the general questions: how distinct is evidentiality as a pragmatic phenomenon, which other functions appear closely, related, and how are these encoded in different languages?

Overall, not only from a theoretical point of view, but also from the analysis of different data presented, the book helps to understand how the social interaction perspective goes with evidentiality and evidential strategies in different languages. The articles represent the most current advances in research on this topic. Thus, I believe students and researchers who look for detailed analysis on evidentiality will benefit from reading this volume.

REFERENCES

Boas, Franz (1938) Language. Pp. 124-125. In Franz Boas, ed. General Anthropology. Boston/New York: D. C. Heath & Company.

Chafe, Wallace, and J. Nichols, (eds.) (1986) Evidentiality: the Linguistic Coding of Epistemology. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex.

Mushin, Ilana (2001) Evidentiality and Epistemological Stance. Narrative retelling. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Aikhenvald, Alexandra (2004) Evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo (2006) Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism. In Henrietta L. Moore & T. Sanders, eds. Anthropology in Theory. Issues in Epistemology, 552-565. Malden, Mass./Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

I am a doctoral student in linguistics at the University of Bucharest, Romania. I'm interested to elucidate how the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics interact. Also, I'm focused on evidentiality, modality and modal markers, in different languages.




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