Volume 54, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Knowing in interaction: Empirical approaches to epistemicity and intersubjectivity in language; Guest Editors: Karolina Grzech, Henrik Bergqvist and Eva Schultze-Berndt

This article provides an introduction for the collection of methodologically oriented papers comprising this Special Issue. We define the concept of epistemicity as used in descriptive linguistics and discuss notions related to it – some well-established, some more recent – such as evidentiality, egophoricity, epistemic authority and engagement. We give a preliminary overview of the different types of epistemic marking attested in the languages of the world and discuss the recent developments in the field of epistemic research focussing on methodologies for investigating epistemic marking. In the second part of the paper, we focus on the more practical side of epistemic fieldwork; the types of data that can be used in documenting linguistic expressions of epistemicity and best practices for data collection. We discuss the experimental methods that are used in the description of epistemic systems, both those developed for this particular purpose and those adapted from other types of linguistic research. We provide a critical evaluation of those materials and stimuli and discuss their advantages and disadvantages. Finally, we introduce the contributions to the Special Issue, discussing the languages studied by the authors of the contributions and the fieldwork methods they used in their research.

A domain pertinent to knowing in interaction is evidentiality, but documenting evidential markers can be challenging. Among methodologies, direct elicitation and questionnaires offer the advantages of efficiency and cross-linguistically comparable data. They can, however, miss markers that are below the level of speaker consciousness, as well as significant discourse and social factors. Experimental tasks can provide cross-linguistically comparable data complete with discourse context, and in some cases evidence of the role of differential knowledge states of participants. A single task might miss genre-specific markers, however. Documentation of extensive unscripted speech in a variety of genres, much of it interactive, can provide a foundation for identifying the full sets of markers to be investigated and for uncovering functions beyond specifying the source of information. Insights from speakers can then take us further, potentially shedding light on subtle circumstances underlying choices among alternatives, particularly those reflecting social factors. But we need to know how to listen. Effective collaboration depends crucially on recognition of the variability of speaker consciousness of the markers. If this is kept in mind, speakers can serve as important co-analysts, scouting through their lifetime experiences to provide hypotheses about the contexts in which alternative constructions would be appropriate, meanings they can add, and social and cultural factors influencing their use. Resulting hypotheses can then be tested against the documented material and refined until they account well for the data. These points are illustrated with material from Central Pomo, indigenous to California.

This article describes the use of eight research tools used in the documentation of evidential and modal use in Lamjung Yolmo, a Tibeto-Burman language of Nepal. For each tool, the methodology is described, and some examples of the usefulness and limitations are discussed. The methods include use of existing and novel tools and materials. Image tasks included the existing resources Family Problem Picture Task and Jackal and Crow , as well as optical illusions. Object tasks included the hidden objects game and magic tricks. Listening and talking tasks included the game twenty questions , reporting previous speech, and a grammaticality judgement task based on multiple reports. Making research methods more transparent, and the open sharing of data and materials, allows us to move forward with better understanding of the contexts of evidential use, and more nuanced cross-linguistic typological analysis of evidential systems.

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.

Epistemicity in language encompasses various kinds of constructions and expressions that have to do with knowledge-related aspects of linguistic meaning (cf. Grzech, Karolina, Eva Schultze-Berndt and Henrik Bergqvist. 2020c. Knowing in interaction: an introduction. Folia Linguistica [this issue]). It includes some well-established categories, such as evidentiality and epistemic modality (Boye, Kasper. 2012. Epistemic meaning: A crosslinguistic and functional-cognitive study . Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton), but also categories that have been less well described to-date. In this paper, I focus on one such category: the marking of epistemic authority, i.e. the encoding of “the right to know or claim” (Stivers, Tanya, Lorenza Mondada & Jakob Steensig. 2011b. Knowledge, morality and affiliation in social interaction. In Stivers et al. 2011a). I explore how the marking of epistemic authority can be documented and analysed in the context of linguistic fieldwork. The discussion is based on a case study of Upper Napo Kichwa, a Quechuan language spoken in the Ecuadorian Amazon that exhibits a rich paradigm of epistemic discourse markers, encoding meanings related to epistemic authority and distribution of knowledge between discourse participants. I describe and appraise the methodology for epistemic fieldwork used in the Upper Napo Kichwa documentation and description project. I give a detailed account of the different tools and methods of data collection, showing their strengths and weaknesses. I also discuss the decisions made at the different stages of the project and their implications for data collection and analysis. In discussing these issues, I extrapolate from the case study, proposing practical solutions for fieldwork-based research on epistemic markers.

This paper discusses methods to investigate epistemic marking in Kogi, a Chibchan language of Colombia. The type of epistemic marking prominent in Kogi grammar belongs to the recently proposed category of engagement, which is concerned with signaling shared vs. non-shared access to a discourse object between the speech-act participants. This is manifested on the one hand in an (ad)nominal demonstrative that is licensed by shared visual or cognitive access to a referent, and on the other hand, in a set of verbal prefixes that reflect (a)symmetries in access to states of affairs. Given the relatively abstract meaning of epistemic markers as well as their particular context sensitivity, the study of such forms comes with certain challenges such as, for example, their elusiveness to semantic elicitation or relative scarcity in naturally occurring speech. The present study aims to circumvent these pitfalls by employing methods that constitute a middle ground between controlled elicitation and spontaneous speech, namely stimuli-based, interactional elicitation tasks, in which participants are asked to collaboratively solve a problem or develop a narrative. In addition to the description of the materials and procedures, the tasks are discussed with regard to the occurrence of engagement forms in the obtained data.

The paper analyses the Swedish modal particles ju and väl as markers of engagement. This analysis finds support in the distribution and frequency of ju and väl in a corpus of spoken Swedish along with an examination of existing accounts concerning the semantics of the investigated forms. Engagement encodes differences in the distribution of knowledge and/or attention between the speaker and the addressee, where the basic semantic contrast consists of the speaker asserting an assumption about the addressee’s knowledge of/attention to an event as either shared, or non-shared with the speaker. Ju and väl are paradigmatically contrastive in signaling shared access to an event from the point of view of the speaker, or the addressee: ju signals shared access to an event and at the same time places the epistemic authority with the speaker, and väl signals shared access to an event, placing the epistemic authority with the addressee. Analytical support for ju and väl as markers of engagement comes from the distribution of both forms with first person ( jag ), second person ( du ), and generic ( man ) subject pronouns.