29.3800, Calls: Gen Ling, Lang Doc, Pragmatics, Semantics, Typology/Germany

Wed Oct 3 02:07:06 UTC 2018

LINGUIST List: Vol-29-3800. Tue Oct 02 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.3800, Calls: Gen Ling, Lang Doc, Pragmatics, Semantics, Typology/Germany

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Date: Tue, 02 Oct 2018 22:04:33
From: Karolina Grzech [karolina.grzech at ling.su.se]
Subject: Knowing in Interaction: Fieldwork on Epistemicity and Intersubjectivity

Full Title: Knowing in Interaction: Fieldwork on Epistemicity and Intersubjectivity 

Date: 21-Aug-2019 - 24-Aug-2019
Location: Leipzig, Germany 
Contact Person: Karolina Grzech
Meeting Email: karolina.grzech at ling.su.se

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Language Documentation; Pragmatics; Semantics; Typology 

Call Deadline: 10-Nov-2018 

Meeting Description:

(Session of 52nd Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea)

Epistemicity in language concerns expressions of knowing (belief, attention,
perceptual accessibility, attitude, rights to knowledge) and their
distribution among the speech-act participants. The distribution of knowledge
has been investigated in terms of ‘intersubjectivity’, and, more recently,
‘engagement’ (Evans et al. 2018). While the term epistemicity has a very wide
applicability in linguistics and philosophy, this workshop is mainly concerned
with grammatical expressions reflecting this notion: inflections, clitics,
auxiliaries and particles. Lexical resources and supra-segmental phenomena
will be left aside.

Epistemic marking reflects how knowledge is distributed in interaction,
including how knowledge states are expressed and tracked by discourse
participants. It encompasses multiple functional categories, such as
evidentiality, epistemic authority, stance and the newly-proposed category of
'engagement'. Despite the growing number of described languages with complex
epistemic marking systems, no systematic methodology exists for studying the
use of such expressions. Moreover, methodological tools used for studying
evidentiality concentrate on the truth-conditionality of the markers and their
morphosyntactic properties in terms of scope and embeddability, and thus are
not sufficient for adequate description of intersubjective epistemic marking
systems.

Bergqvist(submitted) discusses the overlap between epistemic modality,
evidentiality, egophoricity, and engagement in terms of how these categories
reflect the allocation of epistemic authority. He argues that the
qualification of the speaker’s belief, perceptual access, and involvement
constitutes ways of either claiming (direct/sensory access), or deferring
epistemic authority by assigning it to someone else(reported speech), or by
signaling reduced accessibility to the event(non-sensory access/uncertainty).
Whether epistemic authority is indeed a central notion for epistemic marking
remains to be confirmed by empirical investigation. 

Fieldwork-based semantic research on lesser-spoken languages has been
developing dynamically in recent years. However, field semantics is still
mostly concerned with truth-conditional phenomena. Studying language-in-use
has yet to receive systematic treatment in the literature for linguistic
fieldworkers. The methodological advances in the field lag behind its
technological development: with widespread access to affordable
video-recording devices and a rise in the number of digital archives,
linguistic documentation can provide accessible and transparent records of all
kinds of communicative practices. The field of research in which the mismatch
between thriving theoretical interest and lack of methodological progress is
particularly apparent is the study of epistemicity. 

Moreover, corpus data alone are not sufficient to investigate epistemic
marking. In order to test any hypothesis emerging from patterns in natural
language, we need elicitation materials/stimuli that target the relevant
components of epistemic authoritativeness in terms of privileged access,
perception/experience, involvement, attitude, expertise, and stance
construction. Matcher-director tasks, collaborative problem solving, and the
collective production of narratives, have all proved useful for eliciting
epistemics, but more so for some forms of epistemic marking than others. One
challenge that is especially pertinent in the development of such methods is
how to consider the influence of social factors, which may impact on rights to
knowledge, in the analysis of epistemic marking. When accounting for the
distribution and meaning of epistemic marking, how can we situate
socio-cognitive considerations against perceptual and spatio-temporally
grounded accessibility.

Call for Papers:

This workshop aims to bring together field workers and experimental linguists
with an interest in describing epistemic marking systems, in order to discuss
field methods and tools that can be used to document such systems. The main
questions the panel will seek to answer are the following: 

(1) What kind of data is needed to ground our analysis and understanding of
epistemic marking systems in their communicative function as seen in everyday
language use?

(2) What kinds of experimental stimuli should be developed to elicit epistemic
paradigms in a fieldwork situation?

(3) What methods can be used to test the socio-cognitive relevance of our
analyses of epistemic systems? 

(4) How can we ensure that the methods we use in the field deliver results
that can be used for comparative studies of epistemic marking systems?

In line with the questions listed above, we invite contributions centered
around, but not limited to, the following topics: 

- Experimental methods for eliciting forms of epistemic marking, such as
epistemic modals and evidentials;

- Adaptation/use of existing tools and stimuli for work on epistemic marking
systems;

- Methods for tracking knowledge states in experimental tasks and in natural
discourse;

- Methods for establishing semantic distinctions within epistemic marking
paradigms, in particular semantic components of intersubjectivity; 

- Empirically testing the relationship between related functional categories,
such as epistemic modality, evidentiality, egophoricity and engagement.

We believe that, in a field of research as complex as this one, it is
important to learn from our errors, and therefore we would like to encourage
contributors to talk not only about their successes, but also to discuss their
failures and reflect on possible reasons behind them. 

Important Dates: 

10 November 2018:        
Submission of preliminary abstracts (max. 300 words)to workshop convenors
(please send them to karolina.grzech at ling.su.se). 

20 November 2018:        
Notification of inclusion of abstract in the workshop proposal.

15 December 2018:        
Notification of acceptance/rejection of the workshop proposal by the SLE
organisers.

15 January 2019:         
If the workshop proposal is accepted, submission of full abstracts through the
SLE Easychair website

Workshop convenors:
Karolina Grzech (Stockholm University)   
Henrik Bergqvist (Stockholm University)  
Eva Schultze-Berndt (University of Manchester)

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