Epistemicity in Mojeño Demonstratives
Résumé
Epistemicity in Mojeño demonstratives
Amazonian languages are known for letting temporal relations permeate the nominal domain (Tonnhauser 2006, Haude 2006), and in particular demonstratives (Krasnoukhova 2012). In Mojeño (Arawak, Bolivia), not just tense but epistemics and evidentiality as well are found expressed in the NP, and in demonstratives in particular, adding new data to the existing literature on evidentiality in determiners (Gutiérrez and Matthewson 2012, Jacques to appear). This talk will investigate the semantic functions of the Mojeño demonstratives, on the basis of a corpus of spontaneous texts and data elicited with stimuli.
Mojeño displays 9 sets of adnominal demonstratives. The first three sets (-ka, -ro, -na) encode a speaker-oriented three-distance contrast. The other four sets are less specific about location, involve non-visual evidence at utterance time and vary in terms of presence/absence of the referent, timing of the evidence and strength of assertion of the localization (epistemics). They will be presented along a continuum of reliability of evidence for localization. The fourth set (-kni) refers to a non-visible entity which localization is nevertheless strongly asserted. The fifth set (-ngi) refers to an entity that is not visible any more, but for which there has been visual evidence in the past. The sixth set (-kro) refers to a non-visible entity as well, but its localization is only weakly ascertained, for the evidence is not reliable. Examples with -kro could maybe be described in terms of engagement, an emerging notion that participates to the domain of intersubjectivity and covers the epistemic perspectives of both speech-act participants (Evans et al. 2017). More specifically, in assertions, it indicates that the speaker's awareness is strong, contrarily to that supposed of the addressee. In questions, it expresses the doubts of the speaker and the presupposition that the addressee knows better. The seventh set (-ko) refers also to a non-visible entity for which the speaker not only has very low evidence of localization but also of existence. Finally, the suffix-less set and the set with -e seem to be used as a default form, used when the speaker and the hearer share a common ground. Their use is very similar to that of articles.
The epistemic/evidential values of the Mojeño demonstratives are interesting for several reasons. First, while demonstratives have often been described as having some temporal uses, they are more rarely described as expressing epistemicity. However, since demonstratives are "deictic expressions which are used to orient and focus the hearer’s attention on objects or locations in the speech situation”(Diessel 1999:2), they are subject to take part in intersubjectivity and are expected to temporally locate the state of affairs within the speech situation or the universe of discourse. Second, the characterization of the four sets of demonstratives that do not explicitly refer to distance is based on both epistemics and evidentiality, readdressing the question of the boundary between these categories (Faller 2002, Matthewson et al. 2008).