Conjectural questions in Sm’algyax

Colin Brown

doi:10.1515/flin-2023-2051

Article

Conjectural questions in Sm’algyax

Colin Brown

Published/Copyright: January 11, 2024

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From the journal Folia Linguistica Volume 59 Issue 1

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).

Keywords: non-canonical questions; epistemic modality; evidentiality; Tsimshianic

Corresponding author: Colin Brown, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, USA, E-mail: colinjbrown@g.ucla.edu

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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Received: 2022-05-31

Accepted: 2023-07-31

Published Online: 2024-01-11

Published in Print: 2025-04-28

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/flin-2023-2051

Keywords for this article

non-canonical questions; epistemic modality; evidentiality; Tsimshianic