Topic: Across languages, there are different types of systems that classify the presented information with respect to if and how the information should be added to the addressee’s knowledge. Does the speaker express the information as a fact? Does the speaker express some doubt about it? Is the speaker asking about the information? Concepts that are often involved in the expression of epistemics are epistemic modality, egophoricity, evidentiality, sentence-typing and ‘discourse pragmatic markers.’ When describing a language, it is often difficult to analyze these concepts, because they are entangled with other categories and the elements seem to rely on pragmatics for their interpretation. Native speaker intuitions may provide very distinct interpretations of a epistemic element. The goal of these talks is to provide tools for descriptive semantic analysis of different types of epistemic markers. The main challenge is to tease apart the semantics and the pragmatics of these elements.
Today's introductory talk by Martine Bruil:
Expressing knowledge related concepts: i) Evidentiality ii) Epistemic modality iii) Egophoricity iv) Discourse markers, modal particles
Associated motion and its reconstruction in Chácobo (Panoan family, Bolivia)
An AM morpheme expresses a motion event associated with a verb stem with which it combines. This talk provides a new description of associated motion (AM) in Chácobo, a southern Panoan language of the northern Bolivian Amazon. I describe six AM morphemes in Chácobo. Four of these display allomorphy based on transitivity and number, resulting in an AM system with 10 morphs. The morphemes encode distinctions in trajectory (venitive vs. andative), temporal relation with the verb stem with which they combine (concurrent, prior and subsequent), and aspect (imperfective vs. perfective). I then compare the discourse function of AM morphemes to that of lexical motion verbs in Chácobo. Finally, I provide a tentative internal reconstruction of the AM system in Chácobo, discussing their lexical sources and considering the source constructions from which the AM morphemes could have derived.