33.3180, Calls: General Linguistics, Pragmatics, Semantics/Greece

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-33-3180. Wed Oct 19 2022. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 33.3180, Calls: General Linguistics, Pragmatics, Semantics/Greece

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Editor for this issue: Everett Green <everett at linguistlist.org>
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Date: Wed, 19 Oct 2022 21:22:43
From: Karolina Grzech [karolina.grzech at ling.su.se]
Subject: Expanding the boundaries of epistemicity: epistemic modality, evidentiality, and beyond

 
Full Title: Expanding the boundaries of epistemicity: epistemic modality, evidentiality, and beyond 

Date: 29-Aug-2023 - 01-Sep-2023
Location: National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, Greece 
Contact Person: Karolina Grzech
Meeting Email: karolina.grzech at ling.su.se

Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics; Pragmatics; Semantics 

Call Deadline: 10-Nov-2022 

Meeting Description:

This proposal promotes the view that evidentials and other forms of epistemic
marking, i.e. epistemics, are a species of deictics, which require an
analytical focus on the context of use, as well as on the relation between
propositions and the speech-act participants in terms of knowledge
representation and knowledge attribution. Following from this, the challenge
of determining what meaning is encoded by epistemics, and what is implied by
their use, must be met by approaching their analysis from the point of view of
interaction and discourse. This workshop aims to explore the use and meaning
of epistemics, focusing on three main analytical challenges. 

The first challenge is the context-sensitivity of epistemic forms. If the
context of their use is disregarded, the semantics of individual forms is near
impossible to define. The context-sensitivity of epistemics is highlighted by
the fact that their use and meaning are affected both by linguistic categories
they co-occur with, such as person and tense (e.g. Sun 2018), and by
discourse-level phenomena like genre and modality (written/spoken language,
cf. e.g. Nuckolls & Michael 2014). This sensitivity stems from the fact that
the semantic and pragmatic properties of epistemics concern the interactional
dynamics of the speech situation and the respective stances of the speech-act
participants. Variation according to these contextual parameters has often
been noted in the literature, but at the same time, it has been downplayed in
favor of decontextualized exemplifications that permit neat definitions and
paradigms. However, to say that epistemics are sensitive to context is only a
starting point, and in order to make progress in the study of epistemicity, it
is necessary to determine what aspects of the context are relevant for their
analysis.

The second challenge in the study of epistemicity concerns the comparability
of forms and systems between languages, i.e. the cross-linguistic comparison
of epistemics. As we gain access to a growing number of descriptions of
epistemic marking systems from non-European, indigenous languages, it is
becoming increasingly clear that the traditional conception of epistemicity as
subsuming only evidentiality and epistemic modality (cf. Boye 2012) must be
amended to include a much more complex picture; one that emerges from these
growing data sets. Comparatively new notions like egophoricity (cf. Floyd et
al. 2018) and engagement (Evans et al. 2018) should also be possible to relate
to the more established notions like epistemic modality and evidentiality. Do
these distinct labels and the definitions that they house allow for a
meaningful comparison of forms encountered in descriptive data, or are they
disparate grammatical concepts? Again, it is by looking at the contextualized
use of the investigated forms that such comparisons are made possible and
relevant.    

The third challenge is to relate data-driven analyses of epistemics that
emphasize aspects of interaction and discourse to traditional analyses of
similar forms. The established definitions of epistemic modals and evidentials
are by and large couched in an analytical framework that emphasizes
truth-relations and the justification of knowledge (cf. Willett 1988;
Aikhenvald 2004). Such definitions have mainly focused on determining whether
evidentials are modal or non-modal (cf. e.g. Faller 2002; Matthewson 2011)
disregarding other aspects of their meaning. They also advocate a stand-alone
analysis of forms that should be possible to retrieve void of any contextual
cues. Recent proposals, on the other hand, argue for the necessity of
contextual transparency in the analysis of epistemics and question the very
possibility of analyzing these in an objective, de-contextualized sense. Are
these seemingly distinct modes of analysis compatible, or are they at odds
with respect to what they claim?


Call for Papers:

In the light of these three challenges for the study of epistemics, this
workshop aims to explore the following questions:

- How can pragmatics, conversation analysis and interactional linguistics
inform the analysis of evidentials and other epistemics?
- What aspects of interaction are relevant for the description and analysis of
epistemics? Can they be modelled and theorized, and if so, how?
- What role do sociolinguistic factors play in the analysis of epistemics?
Which of these factors are most relevant in accounting for how epistemics are
used?
- What kind of data is important for the description and analysis of
epistemics?

We invite contributions approaching the above questions and issues from
theoretical, methodological and descriptive perspectives. The contributions
can deal with any language, and with any epistemic category, and they should
focus on the analysis of epistemic systems in the context of natural or
naturalistic, interactive language use.

The objective of the workshop is to bring together researchers interested in
the interactional aspects of epistemicity. Through the discussion of different
epistemic categories such as evidentiality, egophoricity, mirativity,
engagement, etc., in the context of their use in interaction, we hope to be
able to formulate directions for future research on epistemicity as an
interactional and/or deictic category. We also aim to contribute to the
development of an empirically-grounded theory of epistemicity which would be
able to account for the context-related characteristics of knowledge-related
expressions, which the currently available theory treats as negligible
idiosyncrasies or ‘pragmatic extensions’ (cf. Aikhenvald 2004) of allegedly
context-independent epistemic meanings. 

Please send the provisional abstracts (max. 300 words) to
karolina.grzech at ling.su.se or henrik.bergvist at gu.se by November 10th, 2022.

References:
Aikhenvald, A. 2004. Evidentiality. Oxford: OUP.
Boye, K. 2012. Epistemic Meaning, A Crosslinguistic and Functional-Cognitive
Study. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. 
Evans, N., H. Bergqvist & L. San Roque. 2018. The grammar of engagement I:
framework and initial exemplification. Language and Cognition 10(1). 110–140. 
Faller, M. 2002. Semantics and Pragmatics of Evidentials in Cuzco Quechua.
Stanford.
Floyd, S., E. Norcliffe & L. San Roque (eds.). 2018. Egophoricity. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins.
Matthewson, L. 2011. On apparently non-modal evidentials. In O. Bonami & P.
Cabredo Hofherr (eds.), Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics 8, 333–358.
Nuckolls, J. & L. Michael (eds.). 2014. Evidentiality in interaction.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Sun, J. T.-S. 2018. Evidentials and person. In A. Aikhenvald (ed.), The Oxford
Handbook of Evidentiality, 47–64. Oxford: OUP.
Willett, T. 1988. A Cross-Linguistic Survey of the Grammaticization of
Evidentiality. Studies in Language 12(1). 51–97




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