Beyond committing and presupposing in Yurakaré conversations: Investigating the interactional functions of epistemic markers through their sequential distributions
-
Sonja Gipper
Abstract
This paper outlines a method for studying the sequential distributions of epistemic markers with the purpose of gaining insight into their interactional functions. The method is exemplified with a case study of two epistemic markers of Yurakaré (isolate, Bolivia), =la “commitment” and =se “presupposition”. The investigation reveals that the two markers show different distributions across initial and responsive utterances. Moreover, each marker functions differently when used in initial utterances and responses. It is argued that these distributions show that the interactional functions of the two markers go beyond the marking of commitment and presupposition, and that they contrast in terms of two scales, one capturing the poles of “highly initiating” and “highly responsive”, the other concerning high vs. low degrees of “thematic agency”. While the commitment marker =la is associated with the responsivity pole and with a low degree of thematic agency, the presupposition marker =se shows a tendency toward the initiating pole and toward a high degree of thematic agency. These findings then support the view that epistemic markers are employed to co-construct epistemic perspectives in interaction rather than to make explicit some internal epistemic state held by the speaker.
Funding source: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
Funding source: Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung
Funding source: Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence
- Abbreviations
- 1
first person
- 2
second person
- 3
third person
- adap
adaptive
- adv
adverbial
- ben
benefactive
- col
collective
- comm
commitment
- dem
demonstrative
- DIM
diminutive
- FR
frustrative
- FUT
future
- INT
intentional
- INTJ
interjection
- INTS
intensifier
- INTSUBJ
intersubjective
- IP
interrogative pronoun
- JUS
jussive
- LOC
locative
- MID
middle voice
- MINTS
medium intensity
- NEG
negation
- OBJ
object
- PL
plural
- POSS
possessive
- PSUP
presupposition
- REA
realis
- REF
referential
- SBJ
subject
- SG
singular
- (SP)
Spanish
Symbols in conversational transcripts
adjacent turns
pause, duration in seconds
start of overlap
end of overlap
lengthening
non-verbal action
Acknowledgments
I am very grateful to the Yurakaré people for teaching me so many things, for being so kind and welcoming, and for making this investigation possible by participating in the data collection. I would also like to express my gratitude to Jeremías Ballivián for facilitating the contacts in the field, conducting the interviews, and for the excellent transcription of the data. This research would not have been possible without his work. The research reported in this paper was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), Project Number 275274422. The SCOPIC data were collected during a field trip funded by Nicholas Evans through his Anneliese Maier Research Award by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 2011/12. I am very grateful to Nicholas Evans for his support. I would also like to thank Julia Colleen Miller for her help with the recording equipment and set-up. Thanks as well to the members of the SCOPIC project for the invaluable discussions on the topic during the project meetings, and to the organizers and participants of the workshop ‘Knowing in interaction’ at the 2019 annual meeting of the SLE for their valuable comments on this work. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and Karolina Grzech for their inspiring comments on earlier versions of this paper, to Sophia Little for improving my English, to the Editor-in-Chief and the Editorial Assistant of Folia Linguistica, Olga Fischer and Sune Gregersen, for their valuable editorial remarks, and to Karolina Grzech for her help and support along all the stages of the paper. All remaining errors are mine. This work also benefited greatly from discussions about linguistic variation in small languages with the members of Nicholas Evans’ Australian Research Council Laureate Project The Wellsprings of Linguistic Diversity. I am grateful for funding from the Wellsprings project (FL130100111) and from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (CE140100041) for my trips to two of the project meetings at Australian National University, Canberra.
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© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Knowing in interaction: An introduction
- Articles
- Context and consciousness: Documenting evidentials
- Looks like a duck, quacks like a hand: Tools for eliciting evidential and epistemic distinctions, with examples from Lamjung Yolmo (Tibetic, Nepal)
- Beyond committing and presupposing in Yurakaré conversations: Investigating the interactional functions of epistemic markers through their sequential distributions
- Fieldwork on epistemic authority markers: What we can learn from different types of data
- Exploring Kogi epistemic marking in interactional elicitation tasks: A report from the field
- Swedish modal particles as markers of engagement: Evidence from distribution and frequency
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Knowing in interaction: An introduction
- Articles
- Context and consciousness: Documenting evidentials
- Looks like a duck, quacks like a hand: Tools for eliciting evidential and epistemic distinctions, with examples from Lamjung Yolmo (Tibetic, Nepal)
- Beyond committing and presupposing in Yurakaré conversations: Investigating the interactional functions of epistemic markers through their sequential distributions
- Fieldwork on epistemic authority markers: What we can learn from different types of data
- Exploring Kogi epistemic marking in interactional elicitation tasks: A report from the field
- Swedish modal particles as markers of engagement: Evidence from distribution and frequency
