Conjectural questions in Sm’algyax
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Colin Brown
Abstract
This paper discusses evidentials and their behaviour in interrogative sentences, based on novel data from Sm’algyax (Tsimshianic, British Columbia/Alaska). Typically, evidentials in declarative sentences receive a Speaker-anchored orientation (“According to my evidence, p”), and in interrogative sentences they receive an Addressee-anchored orientation (“According to your evidence, Q?”). This shift from Speaker to Addressee in questions is referred to as Interrogative Flip, which has been argued to be an obligatory process in canonical questions (Korotkova, Natasha. 2016. Heterogeneity and universality in the evidential domain. UCLA Doctoral dissertation). I discuss a particular evidential sn “Conjectural”, which exhibits variable interrogative flip in questions. The anchor of sn may shift to the Addressee, or it may result in a “Conjectural Question” reading, which I suggest involves a particular orientation of sn to neither the Speaker nor the Addressee. Adopting a simple modal analysis for evidentials, and a pragmatic approach to interrogative flip (Garrett, Edward John. 2001. Evidentiality and assertion in Tibetan. UCLA Doctoral dissertation; Korotkova, Natasha. 2016. Heterogeneity and universality in the evidential domain. UCLA Doctoral dissertation), I suggest that the variable interrogative flip behaviour falls out from the pragmatics of (non-)canonical questions (Farkas, Donka F. 2022. Non-intrusive questions as a special type of non-canonical questions. Journal of Semantics 39(2). 295–337).
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Velna Nelson, Beatrice Robinson, Ellen Mason, Theresa Lowther and all the others I have worked with on the Lax Yuuba Ts’msyen, t’oyaxsut nüüsm! Thank you to Yael Sharvit, Harold Torrence, and Ethan Poole for providing comments on preliminary versions of this work, as well as audiences at the workshop Pragmatics of Evidentials, the Berkeley Syntax & Semantics Circle, and the UBC Gitksan lab, as well as two reviewers for very helpful comments, questions, and suggestions that helped shape this work. This research is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
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© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- The pragmatics of evidentiality: markers, strategies and implications for linguistic theory
- Articles
- Conjectural questions in Sm’algyax
- The epistemic conditional in polar questions as an argumentative strategy
- Evidentials and dubitatives in Finnish: perspective shift in questions and embedded contexts
- Evidential strategies in English: not just lexical
- Romanian presumptive in interaction: evidentiality and beyond
- Some notes on the role of modal particles in weil+V2-clauses in German
- The evidential meaning of presupposition and implicature between retractability and deniability of information
- The interrogative flip with illocutionary evidentials
- Once known, always known. Turn-final sai in North-East regional Italian
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- The pragmatics of evidentiality: markers, strategies and implications for linguistic theory
- Articles
- Conjectural questions in Sm’algyax
- The epistemic conditional in polar questions as an argumentative strategy
- Evidentials and dubitatives in Finnish: perspective shift in questions and embedded contexts
- Evidential strategies in English: not just lexical
- Romanian presumptive in interaction: evidentiality and beyond
- Some notes on the role of modal particles in weil+V2-clauses in German
- The evidential meaning of presupposition and implicature between retractability and deniability of information
- The interrogative flip with illocutionary evidentials
- Once known, always known. Turn-final sai in North-East regional Italian
