The paper is concerned with the epistemological status of testimony and the question of what may confer justification on true testimonial beliefs and enable us to call such beliefs knowledge. In particular, it addresses certain anti-reductionist arguments in the epistemology of testimony and their incompatibility with the grammatical categories of egophoricity (conjunct/disjunct marking) and evidentiality (information source marking) present in the architecture of natural languages. First, the tradition of epistemological individualism and its rationale are discussed, as well as certain attempts (...) within this tradition to include testimony-based beliefs in the body of legitimate and rational beliefs. The next section is concerned with the anti-reductionist approach to testimonial beliefs and some arguments supporting ‘the credulity principle’ grounded in Thomas Reid's philosophy of common sense. The last two sections show how the anti-reductionist argumentation is threatened with an insoluble dilemma when considered in the context of languages with the grammatical categories of egophoricity (conjunct/disjunct marking) and evidentiality (information source marking). Special attention is paid to the justificatory role of egophoric and evidential marking; how these grammatical categories may influence the process of belief formation, and consequently, how this bears upon the nature of justification for testimonial beliefs. The final conclusion of the paper is that the anti-reductionist claim concerning the directness and non-inferential nature of testimonial knowledge is bound to meet objections grounded in the structure of many natural languages. This leads to a paradox: in discussion with reductionism, anti-reductionists do seek support for their arguments in common sense beliefs reflected in everyday language, and, on the other hand, their claims are incompatible with the linguistic data found in a number of natural languages. (shrink)

This article examines how colonial mentalities of subjectifying the people are reinstated in postcolonial Northeast India through the media. Using the Bodos as a context of the argument, the paper studies The Assam Tribune news headlines during the 2021 Assam Legislative Assembly election. By studying both micro- and macrostructures of news headlines, using critical discourse analysis, the article argues that the media continue to reify the subjective consciousness of the population as a discourse that dominates the conflicting ground of social, (...) cultural, and political coexistence across the multi-ethnic populations. While deflecting the government’s divisive policies, the media portrays the government as the source of ‘solution’. Although the technique of governance differs from colonial to postcolonial regime, the objective to constantly subjectify the multi-ethnic population within their realm of subjective consciousness for the purpose of governance remains the same. (shrink)

This article explores the putative addressee in the persuasion of diplomatic discourse by adopting White’s recent proposals as to putative reader/addressee positioning to specifically examine China’s communication efforts through South African English-language newspapers in the Xi Jinping era. Likemindedness is found to be predominantly construed, meticulously balanced with relative frequent construal of uncommittedness and very rare construal of un-likemindedness. And a set of 12 interrelated discourses are identified as fundamental ideological tenets in legitimating China’s African engagement and its vision of (...) world order. Findings show that the classical political discursive strategy of Us/them polarization is typically deployed. The analysis and discussion illustrates how White’s proposed framework can be systematically applied to offer new lines of analysis of persuasion and shed some light on understanding contemporary Chinese diplomatic discourse. (shrink)

This study uses conversation analysis to investigate how participants in Korean conversations negotiate their epistemic rights to information by deploying alternate evidential markers. The participants mutually monitor each other’s different or changing epistemic rights to the information and routinely shift their choice of evidential markers to —tamye to redistribute their epistemic rights. By manipulating the turn-taking and sequence organizations which underlie the —tamye evidential marker, the participants can claim or downgrade their epistemic rights to the information. The findings of this (...) study contribute to research on evidentiality by providing an interactional perspective which takes the orientation of the participants in actual interactions as the starting point of analysis. The study illustrates how evidential markers serve to negotiate the relationships among the speaker, the hearer, and the information in the course of the interaction rather than merely function to reflect an implicit contract or territory between the speaker’s and the hearer’s information. (shrink)

Modals in St’át’imcets (Lillooet Salish) show two differences from their counterparts in English. First, they have variable quantificational force, systematically allowing both possibility and necessity interpretations; and second, they lexically restrict the conversational background, distinguishing for example between deontic and (several kinds of) epistemic modality. We provide an analysis of the St’át’imcets modals according to which they are akin to specific indefinites in the nominal domain. They introduce choice function variables which select a subset of the accessible worlds. Following Klinedinst, (...) we assume distributivity over the resulting set of worlds. St’át’imcets modals thus receive a uniform interpretation as (distributive) pluralities. The appearance of variability in modal force arises because the choice function can select a larger or smaller subset of accessible worlds. Finally, we discuss the implications of our analysis for the investigation of modal systems in other languages. (shrink)

We show in this paper that some expressions indicating source of evidence are part of propositional content and are best analyzed as special kind of epistemic modal. Our evidence comes from the Japanese evidential system. We consider six evidentials in Japanese, showing that they can be embedded in conditionals and under modals and that their properties with respect to modal subordination are similar to those of ordinary modals. We show that these facts are difficult for existing theories of evidentials, which (...) assign evidentials necessarily widest scope, to explain. We then provide an analysis using a logical system designed to account for evidential reasoning; this logic is the first developed system of probabilistic dynamic predicate logic. This analysis is shown to account for the data we provide that is problematic for other theories. (shrink)

Linguistic studies of evidentiality, the coding of source of knowledge, have often appeared divided into two camps: those whose focus is the semantic, morphological and typological characteristics of grammaticalized morphological evidential systems, and those whose focus is on the social functions of non-grammaticalized evidential constructions as markers of epistemic authority and responsibility. While interest in the discourse functions of all evidential systems has been growing as seen in the recent special issue of the journal Pragmatics and Society on ‘Evidentiality in (...) Interaction’, there has been little direct attention on whether the deployment of evidential strategies in discourse varies according to the grammatical status of the grammatical resources available to the speaker. This article examines the nature of both grammaticalized and non-grammaticalized evidential systems in a number of languages to show that while the underlying pragmatics of evidentiality is the same regardless of grammatical system, nonetheless grammaticalized evidential systems provide important evidence of the particular features of knowledge sources that are used in routine ways in discourse sufficiently to motivate their development into grammatical systems. (shrink)

This article contributes to ongoing studies in conversation analysis dealing with the way in which epistemic authority is displayed, claimed, contested and negotiated in social interaction. More particularly, it focuses on the articulation between action format, sequential organization, membership categorization and epistemic authority. The article offers an empirical analysis of the way in which knowledge is distributed and recognized in social gatherings, with a special focus on guided visits. Guided visits are a perspicuous setting for this analysis, since it is (...) an activity in which the guide displays knowledge in comments and explanations and the guided seeks for knowledge in questions. However, this distribution of knowledge is regularly challenged. The article offers a systematic study of a collection of sequences initiated by turns beginning with ‘et là’ and locating a new referent in the environment, either in informings or in questions. While the former are frequently produced by the guide, assuming a knowing status, and the latter by the guided, assuming a not knowing, it is possible to observe informings initiated by the guided, who, by so doing, claims a revision of his or her epistemic authority. Likewise, in second position, questions are generally answered by the guide, but can also be answered by another person, claiming alternative epistemic rights. By examining the details of turn and action design in these environments, the article shows how they either reproduce and confirm the current epistemic status of the participants or challenge, negotiate and transform them. The latter case is particularly revealing of the fact that epistemic status and stance are constantly reflexively elaborated by the participants in social interaction. (shrink)

We show in this paper that some expressions indicating source of evidence are part of propositional content and are best analyzed as special kind of epistemic modal. Our evidence comes from the Japanese evidential system. We consider six evidentials in Japanese, showing that they can be embedded in conditionals and under modals and that their properties with respect to modal subordination are similar to those of ordinary modals. We show that these facts are difficult for existing theories of evidentials, which (...) assign evidentials necessarily widest scope, to explain. We then provide an analysis using a logical system designed to account for evidential reasoning; this logic is the first developed system of probabilistic dynamic predicate logic. This analysis is shown to account for the data we provide that is problematic for other theories. (shrink)

Hart offers a biologically based explanation for the use of an ‘epistemic positioning strategy’ aimed by speakers/writers at the legitimization of assertions, at persuading addressees of the veracity of the propositions, as a prior condition for the discursive legitimization of actions. This article focuses on various issues addressed in Hart’s article, among them the degree of commitment invoked in speakers/writers’ choice of epistemic stance expressions as legitimization strategies, as well as the expression of subjectivity/intersubjectivity in discourse and the degree to (...) which this involves responsibility and accountability for the speaker/writer. The article also provides an alternative proposal of the categories identified by Bednarek for the conceptual domain of evidentiality. (shrink)

Evidentiality has been extensively studied in linguistics for its function in coding the source of knowledge or for expressing the speaker’s attitude towards knowledge. However, few studies examine how evidential marking is sensitive and responsive to the unfolding talk and actions of the participants in social interaction. Analyzing audio and video data of naturally occurring conversations in Korean in a conversation analysis framework, this article demonstrates how the speaker often makes the choice of evidential marking or shifts the choice of (...) evidential marking according to the participant’s response, achieving certain interactional functions. The speaker makes a strategic choice to use the experiential evidential marking -telako or shifts from zero-evidential marking to overt experiential evidential marking -telako for the same proposition to achieve entitlement, objectivity, or detachment regarding his claim. This study shows that, in social interaction, the choice of the speaker’s evidential marking is relative and interactively organized rather than static and predetermined. (shrink)

The linguistic resources used by academic writers to adopt a position and engage with readers, variously described as evaluation, stance and metadiscourse, have attracted considerable attention in recent years. A relatively overlooked means of expressing a stance, however, is through a Noun Complement structure, where a stance head noun takes a nominal complement clause. This pattern allows a writer to front-load attitude meanings and offers an explicit statement of evaluation of the proposition which follows. In this article, we explore the (...) frequencies, forms and functions of this structure in a corpus of 160 research articles across eight disciplines totalling 1.7 million words. Developing a new rhetorically based classification of stance nouns, we show that the structure is not only widely used to express author comment and evaluation, but that it exhibits considerable variation in the way that it is used to build knowledge across different disciplines. (shrink)

This article aims to discover the principle that underlies correlations between choices of evidential qualification and the communicative purposes of Chinese newspaper reportage along the dimension of subjectivity/objectivity. Distributional comparisons of data from the China Times news website reveal a pragmatic distinction between evidential subclasses. Reportatives predominate in politics and business news, where objectivity carries higher weight, while in less objectivity-oriented reports as local news, sensories are of greater frequency. The latter is also prevalent as journalists reflect on a reported (...) event. The level of evidential subjectivity thus varies significantly with the nature of evidence. An evaluation drawn from shared belief tends to be experienced as less subjective than one built upon what is accessible to the journalist alone. This suggests the use of evidentiality as reflective of the stance of the newspaper media. (shrink)

This article reviews arguments that, in the process of action formation and ascription, the relative status of the participants with respect to a projected action can adjust or trump the action stance conveyed by the linguistic form of the utterance. In general, congruency between status and stance is preferred, and linguistic form is a fairly reliable guide to action ascription. However incongruities between stance and status result in action ascriptions that are at variance with the action stance that is otherwise (...) conveyed in the turn. This argument is presented, first, in relation to epistemic status and stance where the process is argued to be both fundamental and universal across all declarative and interrogative utterances. Some consequences of this way of viewing action are discussed. The argument is then briefly extended to deontics and benefactives. (shrink)

Spanish has a series of evidential discourse markers that combine the lexical semantics of visual perception with reference to inference or hearsay, for example, evidentemente ‘evidently’, por lo visto ‘visibly, seemingly’, al parecer ‘seemingly’ and se ve ‘one sees that, apparently’. The main aim of this article is to examine the grammatical, semantic and interactional properties of these four evidential discourse markers in informal and formal spoken Spanish. From a semantic point of view, we study the evidential values expressed by (...) these markers and discuss the correlations between them. From a functional point of view, we analyse the evidential markers on the basis of discourse-interactional criteria such as illocutionary force, position in the turn and kind of turn. From a grammatical point of view, we address the preferences in terms of person and Tense/aspect/modality experienced by these evidential markers in discourse. The main result of our analysis is that, as far as the semantic and discourse properties are concerned, evidentemente differs from por lo visto, al parecer and se ve que. The former seems to refer primarily to shared thoughts, developing a reading that goes beyond any of the traditionally distinguished evidential values. The three other markers, by contrast, refer to indirect evidence, often combining the evidential values of reported knowledge and inference. In talk-in-interaction, the two types of markers behave differently: evidentemente does not enhance turn-taking, whereas the other markers leave room for the co-participant to give his or her view of the state of affairs. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to discuss and illustrate the grammaticalization process and the polysemic and polyfunctional nature of the Spanish and Catalan markers la verdad and la veritat, from an original objectified referential meaning of the forms to a highly subjectified procedural meaning of the markers. The pragmatic meaning of these markers stems from the loss of semantic features and the different uses that they can adopt in a variety of syntactic and pragmatic contexts, where their subjective, evaluative, (...) and intensifying modal dimensions are fully manifested. In lexical terms, they are noun phrases that can take variable and invariable forms. In morphological terms, the variable form is inflected in number and has a referential value, whereas the invariable form, prosodically extraposed, or followed by a verbal predicate when working as pragmatic marker, is always uninflected and is polyfunctional, with a procedural value. When followed by a verbal predicate, la verdad and la veritat acquire a structural dimension, besides their modal illocutionary one, being used as boundary markers that separate description of facts from first person evaluation, in a monologued stretch of discourse. In an interactional context, the marker frequently prefaces counter expectations. In order to show its grammaticalization process, I will discuss and exemplify their role as evidential marker with a truth-attesting value, epistemic modality markers used to introduce the speaker’s attitude to the content of the proposition or to the addressee in the context of an utterance, intensifiers or boosters used to modify the illocutionary force of a speech act, and discourse boundary markers used to delimit real-world facts from personal opinion. In order to account for their polysemic and polyfunctional dimensions, I will propose salient meanings and prototypical functions. (shrink)

Of late, evidentiality has received great attention in formal semantics. In this paper I develop ‘evidentiality-informed’ truth conditions for modal operators such as must and may . With language data drawn from Luoping Nase (a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the P.R. of China and belonging to the Yi Nationality), I illustrate that epistemic modals clash with clauses articulating first-hand information. I then demonstrate that existing models such as Kratzer’s graded possible-worlds semantics fail to provide accurate truth conditions for modals tagging (...) clauses with first-hand information. As a remedy I propose a fuzzy version of possible-worlds semantics with various grades of belief and knowledge. In addition to preserving the expressive power of graded possible-worlds semantics, the fuzzy model will be shown to supply appropriate truth conditions for epistemic modals appended to evidential clauses (i.e. clauses expressing first-hand information). (shrink)

A growing public awareness of the potential negative impacts of corporate activities on the natural environment and society compels large companies to invest increasing resources in the communication of their responsible conduct. This article employs Appraisal theory in a comparative analysis of BP’s and IKEA’s 2009 social reports, each company’s record of their non-financial performance. The main objective is to explore how, through Appraisal resources, BP and IKEA construct their corporate identity and relationship with their stakeholders. The analysis reveals two (...) markedly different approaches to the construction of a responsible corporate identity. While BP deploys interpersonal resources to portray itself as a trustworthy and authoritative expert, IKEA discloses itself as a sensitive and caring corporation, engaged in a continual effort to improve. These differences are interpreted in light of the legitimization challenges the two companies face. (shrink)

My argument here is principally that the ubiquity of epistemics is evident in the ways in which knowledge claims and attributions of knowledge to self and other are embedded in turns and sequences, inform the design of turns at talk, are amended in the corrections that speakers sometimes make, to change from one epistemic stance to another, and are contested, in the occasional ‘struggles’ between participants, as to which of them has epistemic primacy. I show that these cannot be understood (...) in cognitive terms; furthermore, I show that epistemics – again the attribution of knowledge to self and other – is ‘real’ for participants. That is, in these four practices and aspects of interaction it is evident that participants orient to their states of knowledge relative to one another, on a moment-by-moment, turn-by-turn basis. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the Korean suffix -te, which has been variously analyzed as a marker of tense, aspect, tense–aspect, mood, mood–tense, or evidentiality. I argue against all of these approaches and propose instead that -te is a spatial deictic past tense, which triggers an evidential environment. It refers to a certain past time when the speaker either observed an event or some evidence of the event within his (her) perceptual field. Thus, the denotation of -te is ‘overlap’, not between (...) the speaker's perceptual field and the event itself, but between the speaker's perceptual field and the evidence of the event at the past reference time. To account for this denotation, propose an ‘evidence trace’ function as well as a ‘speaker's perceptual trace’ function (cf. M. Faller, J Semantics 21:45–85, 2004). My analysis shows that suffixes like -ess (which is traditionally analyzed as a perfect) play two roles, as an indirect evidential and a perfect, depending on whether they appear with the spatial deictic tense -te or with a simple deictic tense. I argue that in Korean two distinct tense systems—the regular tense–aspect system and the spatial deictic tense–evidential system—exist in parallel. Thus the proposed analysis allows evidentials to be subsumed under the formal theory of tense, aspect, and mood. (shrink)

What follows is a byproduct of a larger work in progress that tries to show the benefits of a ‘thought-oriented’ linguistics, in contrast to the traditional ‘sound-oriented’ approach. It seems obvious that language begins with thoughts in the mind of a speaker and ends with some facsimile of those thoughts in the mind of a listener. Sounds make this communication possible, but they are not the driving force behind the structure that language takes. Because sounds are accessible to public observation (...) and thoughts are not, linguistics has always tilted toward the sounds. I believe, however, that much becomes clearer if thoughts are given the attention they deserve. Among other things, thoughts offer a target for triangulation from multiple perspectives. A compelling illustration is the special attention language gives to number marking, which can be more fully understood in the context of ‘subitizing’, studied by psychologists as the special way the mind processes very small numbers. Yet neither linguists nor psychologists seem to have noticed the mutual relevance of these two phenomena. Another illustration can be found in the relation of past tense to memory. The fact that various languages exhibit multiple past tenses suggests that memories from different periods are qualitatively different, but psychologists are more likely to study how well things are remembered, not how they differ. Linguistics could thus serve as a motivation to broader psychological research. To this list of converging concerns one can add the linguistic expression of ‘modality’, which clearly has broader ramifications. This article has prodded me to look a little further in that direction, incorporating the preoccupation with epistemology that is conspicuous in many indigenous languages of the Western hemisphere. The following, then, is a tentative exploration based on three languages I happen to know something about. Its incompleteness should be obvious, but I hope to carry it further. (shrink)

Within the framework of an interdisciplinary project on epistemic strategies in text and talk, this article examines such strategies in a secondary school textbook on social science. After a summary of current insights into the theory of knowledge in philosophy, psychology and linguistics, it is shown how discourse presupposes and expresses knowledge, with special emphasis on discourse processing and learning from text and its applications in education. The specific aim of this article is to study in some detail how exactly (...) ‘new’ knowledge is formulated in pedagogical discourse, and how ‘old’ knowledge is presupposed in a lesson on migration. We thus are able to describe the categories of, and the functional relations between, old and new knowledge, as discursive manifestations of underlying cognitive strategies of teaching and learning. It was also observed that in textbooks what is purported to be presented as knowledge often has an ideological basis. (shrink)

This paper presents an analysis of three Japanese words — ne, yone, and daroo. These three expressions are often interpreted as tag questions in English. Although these words are semantically closely related, they are not always interchangeable. The subtle differences between them are difficult to grasp, especially for language learners. Numerous studies have been undertaken in order to clarify the meanings of ne, yone, and daroo. However, opinions vary among different scholars, and definitions for these markers are not fully established. (...) This paper applies the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach. It proposes new explications in terms of semantic primes. The proposed semantic formulae clarify the differences between the three expressions and serve as practical tools: Tools which indicate criteria that can assist in choosing an appropriate word for a given situation. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the quantificational variability of Cheyenne indeterminates: the variety of interpretations they can receive and the grammatical contexts that condition these interpretations. Building on analyses of indeterminates in other languages, such as Kratzer and Shimoyama (2002), I present a Hamblin-style analysis of Cheyenne indeter- minates. The proposal builds on the analysis of declaratives and interrogatives argued for in Murray (2010). This analysis can account for the quantificational variability of indeterminates in the scope of propositional operators as (...) well as the scope of illocutionary mood markers. The analysis is formalized in an independently motivated update semantics (Update with Centering, Bittner 2011), which automatically provides the required alternatives. (shrink)

Many if not all evidential languages have a mirative evidential: an indirect evidential that can, in some contexts, mark mirativity (the expression of speaker surprise) instead of indirect evidence. We address several questions posed by this systematic polysemy: What is the affinity between indirect evidence and speaker surprise? What conditions the two interpretations? And how do mirative evidentials relate to other mirative markers? We propose a unified analysis of mirative evidentials where indirect evidentiality and mirativity involve a common epistemic component. (...) A mirative interpretation requires a close temporal proximity between the speech event and the event of the speaker's learning the at-issue content. (shrink)