36.2911, Confs: Workshop at SLE 2026: The Morphosyntax of Who Knows What and How in Interaction (Germany)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-36-2911. Tue Sep 30 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.2911, Confs: Workshop at SLE 2026: The Morphosyntax of Who Knows What and How in Interaction (Germany)

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Date: 29-Sep-2025
From: Jenneke van der Wal [g.j.van.der.wal at hum.leidenuniv.nl]
Subject: Workshop at SLE 2026: The Morphosyntax of Who Knows What and How in Interaction


Workshop at SLE 2026: The Morphosyntax of Who Knows What and How in
Interaction

Date: 26-Aug-2026 - 29-Aug-2026
Location: Osnabrück, Germany
Meeting URL: https://epistemicity.net/workshop/

Linguistic Field(s): Linguistic Theories; Morphology; Semantics;
Syntax; Typology

Submission Deadline: 05-Nov-2025

The morphosyntax of who knows what and how in interaction
Proposal for a workshop at the 59th Annual Meeting of the Societas
Linguistica Europaea (SLE 2026), to be held in Osnabrück, 26-29 August
2026.
Organisers:
Jenneke van der Wal (Leiden University)
Karolina Grzech (UPF Barcelona)
Martina Wiltschko (ICREA/UPF Barcelona)
Summary:
The speaker’s and addressee’s knowledge can be(come) an essential
aspect of a language’s grammar and languages differ in how it is
realized. Some languages encode the source of the knowledge
(evidentiality), other languages may indicate the speaker’s certainty
(epistemic modality), or the relative newness of the information
(information structure, mirativity); additionally languages may show
how the knowledge is distributed across the interlocutors (engagement
and egophoricity). While descriptive and typological research is
making progress in acknowledging the grammar of interactionality and
its variation, formal linguistic models are yet to catch up. This
workshop aims at bringing together descriptivists, typologists and
formalists to explore how epistemicity can be formally modelled.
The Debates About Categories:
While the linguistic category of epistemic modality has long been
studied in the European linguistic tradition, the description of
similar systems in languages beyond Europe caused debate about the
boundaries of this category. For example, should  "source of
knowledge" (i.e., evidentiality) be subsumed under the category of
(epistemic) modality? This eventually lead to the recognition of a
separate category of evidentiality in the typological and functional
literature (Willett 1988, Chafe & Nichols 1986; see overviews in
Aikhenvald 2004, 2018). The conceptual area of the speaker’s knowledge
was thus extended beyond (un)certainty. But crosslinguistic variation
shows even further possibilities, all under the broad term of
epistemicity (see figure and Grzech & Bergqvist in press): the notions
of egophoricity (Tournadre 1992, 1994; see San Roque et al. 2018 for
an overview) and that of mirativity (DeLancey 1997, 2012; Aikhenvald
2012, a.o.) are also proposed to be part of it, as was the category of
engagement (Evans et al. 2018ab, Bergqvist & Kittilä 2020). To this,
we may also add information structure, as this too concerns how the
knowledge states of speaker and addressee affects grammar (see Ozerov
2018 and the MapLE project). Epistemicity thus relates to six proposed
categories and fields.
For all the proposed ‘categories’ within epistemicity, we have seen
the same three debates: Are these independent categories? What are the
boundaries of the category? Is the category universal? These questions
are still hotly debated in descriptive and typological studies, but
also challenge formal linguists: How can we model both the universal
and the language-specific properties in epistemicity? The
crosslinguistic variation in the expression of all the aspects of
epistemicity shows that different languages can grammaticalise
different aspects of epistemicity. This in turn has consequences for a
hypothesised inventory of relevant features, as well as for a
hypothesised universal base.
Morphosyntactic Theory:
The grammaticalisation of the (relative) knowledge of the speaker and
addressee means that interactionality must play a bigger role in the
formal modelling of morphosyntax (Dingemanse et al. 2023, a.o.). Going
beyond cartographic proposals (Cinque 1999, Speas & Tenny 2003, Speas
2004), the recently revived debate about the ‘syntactisation’ of
interactionality (Wiltschko 2021, Miyagawa 2022, a.o.) postulates an
interactional layer in the left periphery of the sentence. Here, the
proposition is grounded with the speaker or addressee, which is shown
to work well for peripheral interactives such as ‘eh?’ or ‘well’.
The grammatical(ised) expression of epistemicity brings the next
challenge for such a framework: there is an undeniable interactional
aspect to such epistemic expressions, yet they are often not expressed
in the left periphery but intimately interwoven with verbal
morphology. How can we account for this interaction between higher and
lower parts of the spine? What is universal and which features are
parameterised? What can the co-expression of different aspects of
epistemicity tell us about the underspecification or
multifunctionality of constructions and formal features? Or should we
be looking for completely different models?
Typology:
In order to know which aspects to account for, typological work is
essential, specifically studies that are interested in and based on
interactional data. It is increasingly clear that a full appreciation
of the semantic-pragmatic functions of epistemic expressions requires
contextualised natural dialogic data (Bergqvist & Grzech 2023, a.o.).
Speakers will naturally indicate their authority over knowledge
relative to the interlocutor in an argument, for example, but less so
in a narrative and even less in elicited sentences. What is the
picture that emerges from such descriptive work? Which aspects of the
conceptual space of epistemicity do or do not get grammaticalised?
Co-expression of different aspects of epistemicity (for example, one
particle for both indirect evidence and mirativity) may also be
subject to constraints. Not any combination is possible in the
expression of evidentiality (Aikhenvald 2004), and only some types of
thetic sentences overlap with mirative expressions (García Macías
2016). And some generalisations seem to contradict each other: where
Peterson (2016:1329) states that sensory evidentials are usually used
for mirativity, Aikhenvald (2021:35) posits that visual evidentials
hardly ever have mirative interpretations. Typologically, which
crosslinguistic generalisations on (the expression of) epistemicity
can be posited and substantiated?
This Workshop:
The proposal for this workshop is rooted in and builds on a number of
SLE workshops in previous years,  which all discussed the empirical
scope of various categories in epistemicity. In the current workshop,
in addition to the questions posed above, we want to discuss the
following questions:
 - Going beyond the debate on categories, which detailed aspects of
the conceptual space of epistemicity can grammaticalise, and which of
these can be co-grammaticalised, i.e. expressed by one grammatical
marker?
 - Are there typological tendencies in 1) which aspects are/aren’t
grammaticalised,  2) which are co-expressed, or 3) how many are
grammaticalised in one language?
 - What do the tendencies in the structuring of the epistemic
grammatical design space tell us about our conceptualizations of
epistemicity, and its links to cognition?
 - How can we incorporate the necessary negotiation of knowledge
between the speaker and the addressee into the description and
modelling of epistemic categories and the relevant grammatical design
space?
 - How can the morphosyntactic expression of epistemicity be formally
modelled? How does interactionality feature in morphosyntactic theory?
Specifically: can the model(s) proposed for and applied to
sentence-peripheral discourse particles also account for more
grammaticalised expressions of epistemicity and interaction?
 - What syntactic effects can we see of the expression of epistemicity
through discourse particles and lexical elements? (e.g. hyperraising
depending on the evidential interpretation of the selecting verb in
Cantonese and Vietnamese, Lee & Yip 2024)
We welcome descriptive, typological, and theoretical contributions
from all frameworks and on any language (family).
Call for Papers:
If you want to be part of this workshop, please send your abstract of
max. 300 words to Jenneke (g.j.van.der.wal at hum.leidenuniv.nl) by 5
November 2025.
NB: Notification of acceptance/rejection of workshop proposals by the
SLE workshops committee will be by 15 December 2025. In the second
step, abstracts for presentations – also those for workshops – should
be submitted via EasyChair by 15 January 2026, for which
acceptance/rejection will be announced by 31 March 2026
References:
Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. Evidentiality. Oxford University Press, 2004.
Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. ‘The Essence of Mirativity’. Linguistic
Typology 16, no. 3 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1515/lity-2012-0017.
Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. The Web of Knowledge: Evidentiality at the
Cross-Roads. Brill, 2021.
Bergqvist, Henrik, and Seppo Kittilä. Evidentiality, Egophoricity and
Engagement. Zenodo, 2020. https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.3968344.
Bergqvist, Henrik, and Karolina Grzech. ‘The Role of Pragmatics in the
Definition of Evidentiality’. STUF - Language Typology and Universals
76, no. 1 (2023): 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1515/stuf-2023-2004.
Chafe, Wallace, and Johanna Nichols, eds. Evidentiality: The
Linguistic Coding of Epistemology. Ablex, 1986.
Cinque, Guglielmo. Adverbs and Functional Heads: A Cross-Linguistic
Perspective. Oxford University Press, 1999.
DeLancey, Scott. ‘Mirativity: The Grammatical Marking of Unexpected
Information’. Linguistic Typology 1, no. 1 (1997).
https://doi.org/10.1515/lity.1997.1.1.33.
DeLancey, Scott. ‘Still Mirative after All These Years’. Linguistic
Typology 16, no. 3 (2012): 529–64.
https://doi.org/10.1515/lity-2012-0020.
Dingemanse, Mark, Andreas Liesenfeld, Marlou Rasenberg, et al. ‘Beyond
Single‐Mindedness: A Figure‐Ground Reversal for the Cognitive
Sciences’. Cognitive Science 47, no. 1 (2023): e13230.
https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13230.
Evans, Nicholas, Henrik Bergqvist, and Lila San Roque. ‘The Grammar of
Engagement I: Framework and Initial Exemplification’. Language and
Cognition 10, no. 1 (2018): 110–40.
https://doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2017.21.
Evans, Nicholas, Henrik Bergqvist, and Lila San Roque. ‘The Grammar of
Engagement II: Typology and Diachrony’. Language and Cognition 10, no.
1 (2018): 141–70. https://doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2017.22.
García Macías, José Hugo. 2016. From the unexpected to the
unbelievable: Thetics, miratives and exclamatives in conceptual space.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico PhD.
Grzech, Karolina & Henrik Bergqvist, In press. Epistemicity in
language: current
horizons, future directions, In: Grzech & Bergqvist (eds). Expanding
the boundaries of epistemicity: evidentiality, epistemic modality, and
beyond. 1-30 Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783111516233-001
Lee, Tommy Tsz-Ming, and Ka-Fai Yip. ‘Hyperraising, Evidentiality, and
Phase Deactivation’. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 42, no. 4
(2024): 1527–78. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-023-09604-2.
Ozerov, Pavel. ‘Tracing the Sources of Information Structure: Towards
the Study of Interactional Management of Information’. Journal of
Pragmatics 138 (December 2018): 77–97.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2018.08.017.
Miyagawa, Shigeru. Syntax in the Treetops. MIT Press, 2022.
Peterson, Tyler. ‘Mirativity as Surprise: Evidentiality, Information,
and Deixis’. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 45, no. 6 (2016):
1327–57. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-015-9408-9.
Speas, Margaret. ‘Evidentiality, Logophoricity and the Syntactic
Representation of Pragmatic Features’. Lingua 114, no. 3 (2004):
255–76. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0024-3841(03)00030-5.
Speas, Margaret, and Carol L. Tenny. ‘Configurational Properties of
Point of View Roles’. In Asymmetry in Grammar, edited by Anna Maria Di
Sciullo. John Benjamins, 2003.
Willett, Thomas. ‘A Cross-Linguistic Survey of the Grammaticization of
Evidentiality’. Studies in Language 12, no. 1 (1988): 51–97.
https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.12.1.04wil.
Wiltschko, Martina. The Grammar of Interactional Language. 1st edn.
Cambridge University Press, 2021.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108693707.



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