[Lingtyp] Funny situations with epistemics

[Wal, G.J. van der (Jenneke)]

Dear linguists,

I am looking for funny situations you encountered in the use and misuse of

  *   Evidentials
  *   Miratives
  *   Egophorics
  *   Epistemic modality
  *   Information structure

The goal is to use these as illustrations in an online course about the broader field of epistemicity (the knowledge of speaker and addressee as expressed in the linguistically), so that participants in the course see the relevance of these markers in an engaging way.
To get us started, I share one from the SIL stories in the field<https://www.sil.org/linguistics/stories-field>:

Roger Van Otterloo tells of the time he was discussing translation with his Kifuliiru friends (Democratic Republic of Congo) and he uttered the sentence “Don’t steal from widows!” They started chuckling, and soon everyone was laughing uproariously. Roger was mystified and wondered if he’d used the wrong tone (Kifuliiru is a tonal language) or what. The Kifuliirus told him, no, the tone was fine, but what he said implied that they could steal from everyone besides widows!

Roger found out that day that the last word in Kifuliiru is the focus, the main point, of the entire sentence. So you need to say  “Those widows, don’t steal-from-them.” The “from-them” is a suffix on the verb, so the last word in the sentence is now “steal.”
Looking forward to hearing your field-fun!
Thanks very much,
Jenneke

--
Dr G.J. van der Wal | she/her
Senior Lecturer at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics<https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/humanities/leiden-university-centre-for-linguistics>
Office: Reuvensplaats 4, room 1.25
https://jennekevanderwal.com<https://jennekevanderwal.com/>
MapLE project: https://epistemicity.net<https://epistemicity.net/>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20250304/a5ff0be4/attachment.htm>