28.4872, Review: Cheyenne; English; Morphology; Pragmatics; Semantics; Syntax; Typology: Murray (2017)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-28-4872. Mon Nov 20 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.4872, Review: Cheyenne; English; Morphology; Pragmatics; Semantics; Syntax; Typology: Murray (2017)

Moderators: linguist at linguistlist.org (Damir Cavar, Malgorzata E. Cavar)
Reviews: reviews at linguistlist.org (Helen Aristar-Dry, Robert Coté,
                                   Michael Czerniakowski)
Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Clare Harshey <clare at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2017 15:28:23
From: Hanno Beck [hbeck at hannobeck.de]
Subject: The Semantics of Evidentials

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36314957


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/28/28-2268.html

AUTHOR: Sarah Elizabeth Murray
TITLE: The Semantics of Evidentials
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2017

REVIEWER: Hanno T Beck, University at Buffalo

REVIEWS EDITOR: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

Linguists have found that many languages have evidential morphemes (de Haan
2013), morphemes that encode the source of information conveyed by a
statement. English does not have evidentials but can express evidentiality
through periphrastic means, as for example with “I heard” in “Lee passed the
test, I heard.” 

Sarah Murray has studied Cheyenne (an Algonquian language with about 2,400
speakers mostly in Montana (Dryer & Haspelmath 2013, Simons & Fennig 2017)),
which has three evidential morphemes. Other languages whose grammars include
evidentials may have more or fewer morphemes with similar or different
meanings. In the case of Cheyenne, Murray explains that one of the evidentials
is reportative, meaning roughly “I hear”; a second is direct, meaning roughly
“I witnessed”; and a third is inferential, meaning roughly “I gather/infer.”
(Of course if used in a question then the morphemes would mean not “I hear”
but “you hear” and so on.) 

There is ample crosslinguistic variety, but obviously one wants to attempt a
unified account of the phenomenon, to give a comprehensive view of how human
languages that have evidential morphemes implement the expression of
evidentiality.

In particular, semanticists interested in this topic will busy themselves with
questions such as: What is the range of meanings expressed by utterances
involving evidentials? What sort of semantic theory will make sense of that
range of meanings? And can we formalize our observations in a way that
accounts for the crosslinguistic data while fitting evidentiality into the
broader landscape of formal semantics and pragmatics?

In “The Semantics of Evidentials,” Murray explores these questions, and brings
readers a full harvest of answers. Though relying primarily on Cheyenne data,
she includes plenty of examples from other languages and, for comparison to a
non-evidential language, English. Here is how she describes her goal: “…this
book develops an explicit, truth-conditional account of evidentiality and the
semantic contributions of all sentence types that does not appeal to separate
dimensions of illocutionary meaning.” (p. 5) By excluding explanations that
rely on “separate dimensions,” Murray is indicating that she will see how far
we can get in spelling out the semantics of evidentials without following the
strategy of Potts (2005), who analyzed conventional implicatures with a
multi-dimensional approach. As scientists we want our toolkit to be as sparse
and simple as we can make it, while still giving sufficiently rich
explanations of the data that we face. Can we stay with a single-dimension
semantic theory, while encompassing the evidential phenomena found in
languages?

The main feature of Murray’s account, as she reminds the reader often, is that
on her analysis an evidential sentence provides three types of semantic
contribution: at-issue content, not-at-issue content, and an illocutionary
relation. In dynamic semantics we ask how an utterance can change a context,
and Murray’s investigation leads her to conclude that there are three types of
change; these depend partly on the particular evidential morpheme in play. 

Here is an English example and a very cursory description of these three
components of context change. With “Pat won a prize, I hear” the at-issue
content provided is “Pat won a prize” and unlike an assertion, this content is
merely being presented but not being actively claimed to be true, nor is it
being advocated that we add it to the common ground. The not-at-issue content
is the larger clause, “Pat won a prize, I hear,” which normally enters the
common ground immediately upon utterance, assuming a sincere report. And the
illocutionary relation is a further adjustment to the overall context – in
this example, the illocutionary relation is empty because the speaker makes no
further commitments. If instead we take “Pat won a prize, I gather/infer,”
here the speaker would be undertaking a slightly greater commitment to Pat’s
having won a prize; thus there is a non-empty illocutionary relation, which
Murray renders as something like “it is at least possible that Pat won a
prize.” This is added to the overall context, with the effect of eliminating
some worlds from the context set (ruling out the worlds where it is not
possible that Pat won a prize). 

This brief illustration would seem clearer in context, and if accompanied by a
diagram. In her book, Murray provides both of these. Indeed, she is quite
liberal in her use of diagrams and the result is that every important example
is not only explained but illustrated. To do valuable work in formal
semantics, one finds oneself surrounded by very abstract notions – and any
time a simplifying diagram can be used, the viewer benefits. 

In Chapter One, “Introduction,” Murray introduces evidentials and outlines her
plan for the book. 

In Chapter Two, “A semantic classification of evidentials,” Murray conducts a
survey of evidentials as used in four languages: Cheyenne, Cuzco Quechua,
St’át’imcets, and German. Here we can see into the workshop of a linguist --
what characteristics she comes up with as the crucial diagnostics and
behaviors associated with evidentiality, and how these generalize
crosslinguistically. These findings become criteria or measuring sticks that
can serve in the evaluation of alternative treatments of the data.

In Chapter Three, “Evidentials and varieties of update,” Murray develops
arguments for what a theory must do to account for the range of phenomena
reviewed in the previous chapter. This is where she provides a full
explanation of her proposed system of three semantic contributions for a
sentence; how evidentials play a role in interrogatives as well as
declaratives; and how her model handles crosslinguistic variation.

What exactly does an evidential do? When you utter an evidential sentence,
what are you accomplishing? This is what Murray explores in this chapter --
the effects achieved by evidentials and how to regard these. If an analysis of
the semantics of some linguistic phenomenon, in this case evidential
morphemes, is to be regarded as more than just one person’s opinion, the
analysis should be formalizable. Murray gets right down to brass tacks and
shows in the next two chapters precisely how this can work, and thus how her
viewpoint can fit usefully with existing theories of formal semantics.

In Chapters Four and Five, “Declarative sentences” and “Interrogative
sentences,” Murray presents the formal implementation of the account developed
in the previous chapters. Her framework of choice here is Update with Modal
Centering (see especially Bittner 2011 for more on this family of frameworks),
but she points out that other frameworks could also be up to the task. There
is nothing in Murray’s findings that forces her to pick Update with Modal
Centering; if you are more familiar with an alternative, you can imagine that
as you read. But a framework will, at a minimum, need some mechanism for
representing the effects of asserted content; content that is presented but
not asserted; content that is not-at-issue; and questions. I am curious to see
how Murray’s approach would translate into a suitable version of the context
framework envisioned in Farkas & Bruce (2010), but there is no reason to
anticipate problems with that. 

Why does Murray spend a chapter focusing on evidentials in interrogative
sentences? It’s a self-imposed test. If Murray’s account is roughly right,
then it should apply well to sentences with other kinds of mood beyond the
declarative. Ideally, an account of evidential interrogatives will differ from
that of evidential declaratives only in the same ways that non-evidential
interrogatives differ from non-evidential declaratives. Murray does uncover
some mysterious behaviors here in Cheyenne, looking at polar questions and
content questions. The content questions with evidentials show a peculiar
ambiguity. This is discussed in depth, and we are presented some options for
how the different readings can be formalized; still, it is not clear how we
predict the acceptable interpretations over the unacceptable ones. This might
be a fruitful area for future research. Some constraint or principle may be
awaiting discovery, and implementation within the Update with Modal Centering
framework or one of its competitors, that will yield further insight on the
puzzle. 

In Chapter Six, “Conclusion,” Murray summarizes very briefly what she has
attempted in this book, again taking care to keep the reader oriented. 

After the conclusion, but before the references and index, there are two
appendices. Appendix A, “Definitions and worked examples,” gives us some
further examples and also provides a synopsis of Update with Modal Centering.
I would have liked to see an example constructed completely, starting with
lexical items and building up an evidential sentence from there, to
demonstrate the compositionality of this system of context-update
contributions. 

Appendix B, “Semantic contributions by phenomenon,” presents charts showing
Murray’s proposed three context-change effects for a variety of evidential and
non-evidential sentences, giving both the semantic tasks performed and how
those are implemented within her specific adaptation of Update with Modal
Centering.

EVALUATION

This is a good book, and more than that, a successful book. That is, the
author clearly sets out a specific mission and then proceeds to fulfill the
mission. As a reader, I never felt lost or at a dead end. Murray takes great
care to keep the reader oriented, to remind us of the big picture while we are
looking at particular data points. 

The book’s material is very clearly presented. Again and again, Murray
hearkens back to one or another of her main points. In fact, although not
primarily intended for the classroom, it would be easy to use this book as
part of an advanced semantics/pragmatics course. It illustrates what a
semanticist does and how the work proceeds; brings the reader up to date on
approaches to evidentials; and demonstrates an application of the Update with
Modal Centering framework. 

One also should commend Oxford University Press, which is energetically
publishing books in its “Oxford Studies in Semantics and Pragmatics” series.
The presentation is attractive, and I found almost no typographical errors. 

A minor confusion that could have been avoided: in this book, numbered
examples, tables, and figures all use the same numbering style. It is
needlessly messy when there exists an example 5.2 illustrated with table 5.1,
while table 5.3 explains example 5.9, and figure 5.2 elaborates example 5.7. A
distinct numbering style for each series (letters, Roman numerals, etc.) would
be preferable to my eye.

In some places Murray points out how introducing updates in a different
sequence would result in different interpretations. What, then, are the
principles that determine an update sequence? A sentence can contribute
multiple updates to the context, so we need rules to guide the order in which
these are processed. If there are generalizations, what are they, and are they
fixed or typologically variable across languages?

I also wonder if the treatment can be made more sensitive to the particulars
of context. For example, Murray’s description of the illocutionary relation
contributed by the inferential evidential – that the at-issue proposition is
at least possible – is certainly a good first approximation, but in the
reality of conversations there is a very wide continuum of interpretations
available for that element. Some inferences are quite tentative, while others
are very firm. If the meaning contributed by the evidential is a point along
some sort of continuum, is it the theory’s obligation to reflect that, or do
we simply have a vague morpheme in the same way that the adjective “tall” is
vague? 

And more generally, if we will be relying on a notion of three types of
context update, I want to learn a bit more about that third one, the
illocutionary relation. What is the set of possible illocutionary relations,
is that set constrained in interesting ways that tell us things about human
language and the mind, etc., because we want it to be a source of insight, not
a collection of ad hoc processes for which the theory had no other place.
Addressing this in depth would have taken Murray too far from her core topic
in this book, but I do believe that these bolts should be tightened up at some
point, if illocutionary relations are to play a role in analyzing other
linguistic phenomena.

A positive experience is supposed to leave you wanting more. This is the
situation with “The Semantics of Evidentials.” Indeed, as it is a fairly short
book (172 pages), one wishes for a few extra pages dedicated to discussion
about where the author believes we should go next. Which languages are most in
need of exploration, which phenomena are still not well understood, what
issues lie at the boundary between evidentiality and modality, what
enhancements to Update with Modal Centering are worth considering, etc.  

What should semanticists say about the bundle of phenomena known as
evidentiality, particularly as embodied in evidential morphemes? This book
provides a promising and attention-worthy answer, delivered with clarity. 

REFERENCES

Bittner, Maria. (2011) Time and modality without tenses or modals. In Renate
Musan and Monika Rathert (eds.), Tense Across Languages, pp. 147-188.
Tuebingen: deGruyter.

Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) 2013. The World Atlas of
Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology. 
(Available online at http://wals.info, accessed on 2017-08-17.) 

Farkas, Donka, and Bruce, Kim. (2010) On reacting to assertions and polar
questions. Journal of Semantics 27(1), 81-118. 

de Haan, Ferdinand. (2013) Semantic Distinctions of Evidentiality. In: Dryer,
Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) The World Atlas of Language Structures
Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
(Available online at http://wals.info/chapter/77, accessed on 2017-08-23.) 

Potts, Christopher. (2005) The logic of conventional implicatures. Oxford
Studies in Theoretical Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Simons, Gary F. and Charles D. Fennig (eds.) (2017) Ethnologue: Languages of
the World, Twentieth edition. Dallas, Texas: SIL International. Online
version: http://www.ethnologue.com.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Hanno Beck is a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics, The University
at Buffalo (State University of New York). He is currently teaching
linguistics and German, while pursuing research on “subjective” language use,
as well as the semantics and pragmatics of the tough-construction.





------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*****************    LINGUIST List Support    *****************
Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
            http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/
 


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-28-4872	
----------------------------------------------------------
Visit LL's Multitree project for over 1000 trees dynamically generated
from scholarly hypotheses about language relationships:
          http://multitree.org/