24.1827, Review: Cognitive Science; Linguistic Theories; Semantics: Boye (2012)

Thu Apr 25 16:13:30 UTC 2013

LINGUIST List: Vol-24-1827. Thu Apr 25 2013. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 24.1827, Review: Cognitive Science; Linguistic Theories; Semantics: Boye (2012)

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Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2013 12:13:03
From: Robert LaBarge [robert.labarge at gmail.com]
Subject: Epistemic Meaning

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/23/23-3265.html

AUTHOR: Kasper  Boye
TITLE: Epistemic Meaning
SUBTITLE: A Crosslinguistic and Functional-Cognitive Study
SERIES TITLE: Empirical Approaches to Language Typology [EALT] 43
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2012

REVIEWER: Robert Earl LaBarge, Arizona State University

SUMMARY

Kasper Boye’s “Epistemic Meaning” is a book based on the author’s doctoral
dissertation of the same name, supervised by Peter Harder at the University of
Copenhagen. Boye’s work can informally be divided into two major parts, as
indicated by the book’s subtitle -- the first part, which might be termed the
“crosslinguistic” section, includes a nearly exhaustive study of the
philosophical and linguistic notions of epistemic meaning and provides
examples of its manifestations in a wide-range of languages (Chapters 1 and
2). Following this, Boye devotes the next two-thirds of his work to a
functional account of epistemic meaning as expressed in terms of semantic
mapping, scope issues, and the notion of propositions (Chapters 3, 4, and 5),
among other topics. These three chapters may be called the
“functional-cognitive” section of the work, and it is here especially that
Boye invokes and builds upon the tradition of the same name (citing and adding
to the ideas of Aikhenvald 2004, 2010, Bybee 1985, de Haan 1999, Givón 1982,
Halliday 1970, 1985, and many others). The author borrows from other (formal)
traditions as well, presenting a descriptive account of the problems of
epistemic meaning while remaining focused on what conclusions can be drawn
from the evidence at hand. Chapter 6 presents a short conclusion.

Beginning in the first chapter, Boye discuss his preliminary assumptions and
theoretical and empirical bases, as well as how he plans to elaborate the work
that has been done so far on epistemic meaning. Crucially, Boye takes the
notion of epistemic meaning to include both evidentiality and epistemic
modality. In discussing the history of thought in these areas, that is, how
evidentiality and epistemic modality have been considered to be traditionally
related, Boye comments that three ideas about the relationship between these
two categories are prevalent.  These three ideas maintain, namely, that
evidentiality and epistemic modality are separate but perhaps related, that
the two categories do in fact bleed into one another, despite their
separation, and thirdly, that one category is a subset of another (p. 1-2).
Boye’s goal is explicit with respect to the research that precedes his: the
two categories are distinct but themselves subsets of a larger category of
epistemicity (p. 2).

What are the meanings of evidentials and epistemic modals, and why categorize
them as part of a larger group? Boye recognizes the complexities of defining
these ideas, but writes that his term epistemic/epistemicity “covers not only
the notion of degree of certainty or epistemic support, but also the notion of
source of information or epistemic justification” (p. 15). Careful not to beg
the question, Boye invokes philosophical history dating back to ancient
Greece, noting that epistemology as a whole examines “the notion of
knowledge”, which includes “notions such as belief, certainty, epistemic
necessity and epistemic possibility...[which] maybe be generalized over in
terms of the notion of epistemic support”, the very definition of “epistemic
modal meaning” (p. 18). Such notions carry over into the category of
justification/evidentiality, which takes its place next to epistemic support
under a larger category of “justificatory support” (i.e., epistemicity, p.
36).

After Boye establishes the parameters for his research, he begins looking at
various data in earnest. Chapter 2 is devoted not only to what characterizes
(or would characterize) a general epistemic system, but how that system is
instantiated in a number of specific languages (his fifty-language sample is
mostly North and South American, p. 12-13). In his words, “not all epistemic
expressions are found in notionally coherent systems. In fact, the majority
seems to be found in incoherent systems or in no system at all” (p. 49). That
is to say, languages do not all deal with   epistemicity, evidentiality, or
epistemic modality morphologically, but all languages must deal with these
problems in some way (p. 114). The tendency here, then, to define groups of
phenomena as (or some deviation from) “notionally coherent systems” is a way
to provide descriptive adequacy for epistemic systems, and the linguistic
examples given (p. 53-120) reflect this methodology.

In his fifty-language sample, Boye finds a number of possibilities with
respect to epistemic systems and their subsystems. Many of the languages, if
not most, handle epistemic systems morphologically. As for those that don’t,
“[i]t may be hypothesized that even if a language does not show systematic
coding of epistemic meaning, it still shows ‘scattered coding’, and that even
if a language does not show grammaticalized coding, it still shows lexical
coding” (p. 114).  According to Boye, then, the universality of epistemic
systems is coded in some extra-linguistic conceptual system.

In order to get at what this conceptual system is, or, at the very least, to
describe how this conceptual system interacts with the linguistic system, Boye
turns towards a functional-cognitive examination of epistemicity in the latter
two thirds of his book. Chapter 3 discusses semantic maps, which are a way to
visually depict and describe the phenomena outlined and discussed so far.
Semantic maps include “a number of notions[,] each of which generalizes over a
number of specific meanings” and between the notions themselves “‘connecting
lines’, each of which symbolizes a relation between notions” (p. 126).

Boye shows that epistemic systems can be described by selectively highlighting
or foregrounding certain aspects of the semantic map. For instance, in a
semantic map detailing epistemic notions of Direct and Indirect Justification,
and Full Support, Partial Support, and Neutral Support, the Egyptian Spoken
Arabic ‘jimkin’ and Finnish ‘-ne’ (both glossed as ‘probable/possible’)
particles can be said to fall within the Partial Support/Neutral Support
section of the map (p. 144), while “Turkish, Jacaltec, and perhaps Ladakhi”
have “synchronically polyfunctional expressions” that fall under the domain of
Full Support/Partial Support (p. 140).  Crucially, as the map makes clear, no
language will have epistemic expressions that fall under two unconnected nodes
on the semantic map, as in Full Support/Neutral Support, without including the
middle node of Partial Support (p. 155).

Boye shows that in languages like Slave and West Greendlandic, there are
expressions that highlight the map vertically in that they indicate Indirect
Justification/Partial Support. Overall, then, the semantic map makes the case
for a larger category of epistemicity (i.e., the map as a whole) and the
related subcategories of justification (evidentiality) and support (epistemic
modality), with any individual language having the ability to connect the
notions in very specific and limited ways (p. 155-156).

Chapter 4 seeks to argue that all three types of epistemic meaning
(epistemicity, evidentiality, and epistemic modality) share certain “scope”
properties and thus support the descriptive account given so far (p. 183).
Boye defines scope operationally: “[t]he scope of a given meaning is defined
as the meaning to which the meaning at hand applies...a property of linguistic
meanings rather than of linguistic expressions” (p. 183). That is, Boye is
arguing that the meaning properties of epistemic expressions scope over
certain parts of sentences, akin in spirit to quantifiers, operators, and
negatives. Likewise, as we would assume that the latter three categories would
take their scopal behavior as part of their definition, so should we assume
that we could similarly define and describe epistemic scope.

For example, taking the notion of speech acts, Boye argues that they are, or
can be, epistemic in nature: “at least one type of such communicative
interactions [i.e., speech acts] must be understood as having a meaning
correlate: ‘Illocutionary acts’ depend on ‘illocutionary forces’, and
illocutionary forces must ultimately be understood as a kind of meanings
[sic]...these meanings may be coded as semantic (conventional) meanings” (p.
187). In other words, meanings such as epistemicity “scope over” the domain of
the entire sentence. Other phenomena that share similar scope properties
include state-of-affairs complements and propositional complements, which,
according to Boye, can be distinguished in certain English examples (p. 192,
Boye’s example #4.14):

I saw [him write a letter].		(State-of-affairs complement)
I saw [(that) he was writing a letter].	(Propositional complement)

Such differences are handled morphologically in Turkish, for instance, and
most of the rest of Chapter 4 is dedicated to giving examples of how epistemic
expressions fit into different clause types (declaratives, interrogatives, and
imperatives) crosslinguistically, whether morphologically or periphrastically.

The notions of propositions and states-of-affairs return in Chapter 5 for a
functional-cognitive analysis in earnest, which is the culmination of Boye’s
work so far. The questions examined here include: What is the purpose of an
epistemic system?; and Why are such phenomena linguistically ubiquitous? For
Boye, the answer to these lies in part with the idea that “evidential meanings
are linguistic prompts…to evoke an epistemic-justification structure” and that
“epistemic modal meanings are linguistic prompts to evoke an epistemic-support
structure” (p. 293-294). Each structure differs from itself by evoking
structures of differing strengths (p. 293-294). Tied to this is the idea that
“the justificatory-support structure represents a general cognitive capacity
for anchoring pieces of conceptual information about the world in other pieces
of conceptual information, or in other types of concepts” (p. 294). Epistemic
systems, then, are a way to articulate claims of certainty about propositions,
or from the other direction, linguistic cues to build a structure that allows
a listener to comprehend claims of certainty about a proposition. This is, as
Boye points out, an important survival skill (p. 294-297).

Returning to the semantic map discussed in Chapter 3, Boye remarks that “[t]he
continuity of the three regions of the map [i.e., epistemicity, evidentiality,
and epistemic modality] reflects the coherence of the three conceptual
structures evoked by the meanings found in the relevant regions” (p. 301).
These are anchored to propositions via reference structure, which accounts for
the properties of scope discussed previously (p. 316). Boye closes the chapter
discussing these ideas in detail with respect to the data given. Chapter 6
presents a short conclusion, reaffirming his goals and general conclusion,
that evidentiality and epistemic modality are indeed subcategories of
epistemicity as a whole.

EVALUATION

Boye’s work is a valuable addition to the literature on epistemic meaning --
he is very clear about his thesis and goals and is careful to show how each is
demonstrated and met. In an important way, Boye not only builds upon previous
work, but settles a question posed by his predecessors: How is the epistemic
system characterized with respect to evidentiality and epistemic modality? His
solution of putting the latter two under the domain of the former allows for
descriptive adequacy to be reached in this area of inquiry.

In his attempt to explain much of the data and the concepts he was dealing
with, I was surprised and impressed to see that Boye invokes not only the
major players in his own discipline, but many in formal linguistics (Werner
Abraham, Lisa Matthewson, Guglielmo Cinque, and others) and philosophy (Donald
Davidson, Carnap, Grice, Searle, Strawson) as well, which is a move that more
ideologically committed researchers would tend to avoid. In this broader
sense, there is certainly something of interest here for any researcher of
epistemicity (or for that matter, epistemology).

As I mentioned above, the work can be informally delineated into two sections:
one on crosslinguistic data and epistemic systems and subsystems, and the
other on the functional-cognitive account of these data. Any typologist
working in the vein of Aikhenvald (2004) and others who is interested in
epistemic meaning would do well to investigate Boye’s work, if not but for the
bulk of crosslinguistic data in the first “section” alone. These first two
chapters, comprising a total of 125 pages, are an incredibly valuable resource
in and of themselves to any linguist interested in a crosslinguistic breakdown
of epistemic meaning and its instantiations.

Naturally, of course, the data presented here are of use to those in related
disciplines, such as syntacticians, semanticists, and others, especially those
interested in American languages. However, the vast majority of data given is
synchronic -- linguists who specialize in grammaticalization may not find much
in terms of comparative data in this text alone.

As for the second section, I found myself struggling at times with some of the
conceptual material, but this is likely because my own training as a
syntactician has necessitated a paucity of study into functional-cognitive
linguistics. Despite this, however, Boye’s solutions and ideas seem innovative
and plausible, although I am unsure if his conclusions achieve explanatory
adequacy, as the author is careful, on several accounts, to maintain that his
in-depth descriptive account of the data may preclude such an effort.

Nevertheless, in characterizing the epistemic system in such a way, Boye has
hardly closed the door on the topic -- in fact, his work is likely to promote
new and further interesting investigations into the problems discussed. Seeing
an author make use of a wide array of data and theories ought to be an
inspiring call for other like-minded linguists to do the same in order to
bridge disciplines and ideas, and to promote using similar research as a
springboard for the creative investigation of linguistic problems.

REFERENCES

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

Aikhenvald, Alexandra.  2010.  Imperatives and Commands.  Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

Bybee, Joan.  1985.  Morphology: A Study of the Relation between Meaning and
Form.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

de Haan, Ferdinand.  1999.  Evidentiality and epistemic modality: Setting
boundaries.  Southwest Journal of Linguistics 18: 83-101.

Givón, Talmy. 1982.  Evidentiality and epistemic space.  Studies in Language
6: 23-49.

Halliday, M. A. K.  1970.  Functional diversity in language as seen from a
consideration of modality and mood in English.  Foundations of Language 6:
322-365.

Halliday, M. A. K.  1985.  An Introduction to Functional Grammar.  London:
Edward Arnold.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

R. E. Santana-LaBarge is a student of Elly van Gelderen at Arizona State
University in Tempe, Arizona. His fields of interest include Minimalist
syntax, formal semantics, the philosophy of language, and Cartesian
rationalism.

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