Volume 68, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Epistemic marking in typological perspective, Issue Editors: Lila San Roque and Henrik Bergqvist

This paper discusses forms of epistemic marking that instantiate multiple perspective constructions (see Evans 2005). Such forms express the speaker’s and the addressee’s simultaneous epistemic perspectives from the point of view of the speaker, crucially relying on the assumptions of the speaker with regard to the addressee’s knowledge. The analysis of forms considers established semanto-pragmatic concepts, such as semantic scope, mitigation strategies and communicative intention (as marked by sentence-type) in the exploration of forms. In addition, the notion of knowledge asymmetry is discussed alongside the concepts of epistemic status and stance as tools for a semantic analysis of investigated forms.

This paper studies forms attested in Kakataibo (Panoan, Peru) for situating the information presented by the speaker from the perspective of the addressee. The constructions discussed can satisfactorily be accounted for by means of the notions of epistemic status and epistemic stance, which have to do with the knowing status of speech act participants and how it is expressed in grammar. Salient characteristics of the mechanisms used in Kakataibo to encode addressee’s perspective are the diversity of the relevant forms, which come from two different paradigms, and the semantic and pragmatic features that play a role in their distribution.

This paper analyses reported speech, thought and epistemic modality in the North Western Australian Aboriginal language Ungarinyin. It demonstrates how these grammatical domains interact in the language to encode multiple perspective meanings. The paper concludes by discussing some implications of the Ungarinyin patterns for expressions of complex perspective elsewhere.

Languages have complex and varied means for representing points of view, including constructions that can express multiple perspectives on the same event. This paper presents data on two evidential constructions in the language Duna (Papua New Guinea) that imply features of both speaker and addressee knowledge simultaneously. I discuss how talking about an addressee’s knowledge can occur in contexts of both coercion and co-operation, and, while apparently empathetic, can provide a covert way to both manipulate the addressee’s attention and express speaker stance. I speculate that ultimately, however, these multiple perspective constructions may play a pro-social role in building or repairing the interlocutors’ common ground.

This paper investigates the interactional uses of the two Yurakaré (isolate, central Bolivia) epistemic modal markers and = ya ‘intersubjective’ and = laba ‘subjective’. While subjective = laba indicates a personal epistemic judgment of the speaker, intersubjective = ya conveys that the speaker expects the addressee to share the expressed epistemic judgment. The distributions of the two markers in interaction are argued to reflect their (inter)subjective meaning components. This demonstrates that conversational data provide important clues for investigating (inter)subjective meanings in language.