Evidentials and Relevance

Ifantidou, Elly

doi:10.1075/pbns.86

Cited by 222 publications

(93 citation statements)

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“…Two major features of evidential systems are particularly relevant in this respect. First, despite the considerable variability of evidential systems cross-linguistically (Aikhenvald & Dixon, 2001;Anderson, 1986;Chafe & Nichols, 1986;Cinque, 1999;Delancey, 2002;Faller, 2002;Garrett, 2000;Givón, 1982;De Haan,1998Ifantidou, 2001;Izvorski, 1998;Johanson & Utas, 2000;Kratzer, 1991;Mayer, 1990;Mushin, 2001;Palmer, 1986;Papafragou, 2000;Speas, 2004;Willett, 1988), the semantics of evidential morphology seems to draw in systematic ways from a relatively restricted range of basic evidential concepts. According to Willett (1988), who surveyed data from 32 languages, there are three main types of source of information that are encoded grammatically: direct access (in particular, perception), reports from others, and reasoning (where the last two fall under indirect access).…”

Section: John Was Apparently Singingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evidentiality in language and cognition

et al. 2007

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What is the relation between language and thought? Specifically, how do linguistic and conceptual representations make contact during language learning? This paper addresses these questions by investigating the acquisition of evidentiality (the linguistic encoding of information source) and its relation to children's evidential reasoning. Previous studies have hypothesized that the acquisition of evidentiality is complicated by the subtleness and abstractness of the underlying concepts; other studies have suggested that learning a language which systematically (e.g. grammatically) marks evidential categories might serve as a pacesetter for early reasoning about sources of information. We conducted experimental studies with children learning Korean (a language with evidential morphology) and English (a language without grammaticalized evidentiality) in order to test these hypotheses. Our experiments compared 3-and 4-year-old Korean children's knowledge of the semantics and discourse functions of evidential morphemes to their (non-linguistic) ability to recognize and report different types of evidential sources. They also compared Korean children's source monitoring abilities to the source monitoring abilities of English-speaking children of the same age. We found that Korean-speaking children have considerable success in producing evidential morphology but their comprehension of such morphology is very fragile. Nevertheless, young Korean speakers are able to reason successfully about sources of information in non-linguistic tasks; furthermore, their performance in these tasks is similar to that of English-speaking peers. These results support the conclusion that the acquisition of evidential expressions poses considerable ☆ We wish to thank Lila Gleitman, Henry Gleitman, Eleni Miltsakaki, and the other members of the CHEESE seminar at the University of Pennsylvania for discussion of this project. Thanks also to Seungyun Yang for experimental help. This research was partly supported by NIH/NRSA Grants #F32MH065020 to Anna Papafragou and #1F32HD043532 to Peggy Li and by SSHRC Grant #410-2003-0544 to Chung-hye Han. * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: papafragou@psych.udel.edu ,pegs@wjh.harvard.edu, youngonc@sas.upenn.edu, chunghye@sfu.ca. 15 Again, the basic results do not change regardless of the which linguistic score was compared with which non-linguistic score. There is always an effect of Task (Non-linguistic better than Linguistic), and always an effect of Task × Age (with a larger Age effect for Nonlinguistic than Linguistic tasks). 24 Such mapping problems have been originally pointed out and discussed in the context of learning procedures for mental verbs (Gillette, Gleitman, Gleitman, & Lederer, 1999;Gleitman, 1990;Papafragou, Cassidy, Gleitman, & Hulbert, 2004;Snedeker & Gleitman, 2004). As these authors point out, observational cues to the meaning of mental verbs such as think or believe are few and impoverished compared to those for action verbs such as catch or eat. On at least some occas...

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Section: John Was Apparently Singingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evidentiality in language and cognition

et al. 2007

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“…Evidential markers (EMs) constitute a subclass of pragmatic markers that are alternatively defined as PrMs that "signal the degree of confidence, positive or negative, weakly or strongly, held by the speaker about the truth of the basic message" (Fraser, 1996: 167), and as PrMs that "indicate a speaker's attitude regarding the validity of certain information, for example, whether it is certain, probable, or untrustworthy" (Nuckolls, 1993: 235). In addition to marking the source and the reliability of information and knowledge (Ifantidou, 2001: 3), they may also indicate how knowledge or information was acquired, for example, through personal experience, inference, or report (Nuckolls, 1993: 235).…”

Section: Prms Marking Manipulative Intent In Political Interviewsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Manipulative uses of pragmatic markers in political discourse

Furkó

2017

Palgrave Commun

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Pragmatic markers comprise a functional class of linguistic items that do not typically change the propositional meaning of an utterance but are essential for the organization and structuring of discourse, for marking the speaker's attitudes to the proposition being expressed as well as for facilitating processes of pragmatic inferences. Pragmatic marker research has been characterised by descriptive approaches: even case studies that take their data from political discourse tend to focus on linguistic patterns of co-occurrence and sequentiality rather than social-institutional norms or broader societal concerns. The novelty of this article is, therefore, in linking pragmatic marker research, a primarily discourse analytical, language-oriented field to the broader field of Discourse Studies with a focus on manipulative social practices and their manifestations in discursive strategies. This article analyses evidential markers, general extenders, quotation markers and markers of (un)certainty 1 in political interviews broadcasted by the BBC, CNN and Hungarian ATV. After a short overview of the formal and functional characteristics of pragmatic markers and their relevance to Discourse Studies in general and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) research in particular, characteristics of the political interview as political discourse, institutional discourse and media(tised) discourse are discussed. In the second part, the results of previous (primarily descriptive and genre analytical) research are reconsidered from the perspective of CDA and particular pragmatic markers are associated with manifestations of manipulative intent, such as suppression, polarization, recontextualising, conversationalisation and intended ambiguity. An important finding of this study is that a single pragmatic marker can serve several manipulative functions, while a given manipulative strategy is potentially realized by a variety of pragmatic items. Potential manipulative uses are exemplified with a view to applying the heuristic to the analysis of representations of particular political events and happenings, which is a direction for further research.

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“…Aijmer 1997, Simon-Vandenbergen 2000, Ziv 2002, Thompson 2002, Kärkkäinen 2003, Kaltenböck 2010, Relevance Theory (e.g. Blakemore 1990/1991, Ifantidou 2001, prosodic analysis (e.g. Wichmann 2001, Kaltenböck 2008, Dehé and Wichmann 2010, language acquisition (Diessel and Tomasello 2001), or from a cultural perspective (Wierzbicka 2006).…”

Section: ¿Qué Son Las Comment Clauses?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Macrosintaxis de las "comment clauses": rasgos prototípicos y construcciones intermedias

Rodríguez

2015

Círculo De Lingüística Aplicada a La Comunicación

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ResumenLas comment clauses tienen características parecidas a los marcadores pragmáticos, hasta el punto de constituir un estadio previo en su evolución. Sus rasgos prototípicos incluyen la distribución parentética, la movilidad y la marginalidad sintáctica. Sin embargo, hay situaciones intermedias donde aún se mantienen las marcas de subordinación, sobre todo en los casos de comment clauses procedentes de verbos epistémicos en primera persona. En este trabajo se revisa la macrosintaxis de estos estadios intermedios para contribuir a la construcción de una gramática del discurso. Constituyen un estadio intermedio en el proceso evolutivo que genera marcadores discursivos. Analizaremos el corpus (cap. 3) para extraer resultados sobre las CC que se emplean en él y las construcciones en las que aparecen. Esta investigación nos ha mostrado, por un lado, cuál es el prototipo sintáctico de CC, así como la existencia de otros estadios menos fijados: la construcción libre no integrada (cap. 4), la inicial parentética (cap. 5) y los casos en que aparece intercalada pero integrada sintácticamente en la oración (cap. 6). Todo ello nos permitirá en las conclusiones (cap.7) describir detenidamente el proceso evolutivo y diferenciar las CC de los operadores discursivos. ¿Qué son las comment clauses?Los estudios Las CC son descritas en la gramática de Quirk y otros ([1972] Generalmente presentan un grado más avanzado en el proceso evolutivo ya que aparecen en muchas ocasiones solas en la conversación coloquial. La situación en el 3 Pragmatic markers y discourse markers respectivamente en Fraser (1990Fraser ( , 1996Fraser ( , 2006Fraser ( , 2009 Tabla 1:Comment clauses en el corpus del PA Se usan, pues, más estas expresiones como integradas, excepto insisto, repito, me pregunto, espero. Espero no aparece como verbo principal con el valor epistémico, sino con el de acción de permanecer en un sitio o situación ante un inminente suceso. Me pregunto, por la presencia del clítico, ya es una construcción con contenido modal, lo que la hace estar más cercana al uso como CC. Estas unidades actúan como modalizadores de la aserción (Fant 2007, FuentesRodríguez 2008) en una doble dirección:-presentan lo dicho como asumido por el hablante. Este es el enunciador, el responsable de lo dicho. En este sentido refuerzan el papel del hablante. -atenúan la fuerza de la aserción, como estrategia argumentativa y de autoimagen del hablante. Lo dicho no se impone, sino que el hablante limita su validez a su opinión. Es un uso estratégico que en ocasiones se emplea para el refuerzo de la identidad en el discurso confrontacional, como es el caso del Parlamento (Fuentes Rodríguez 2010 5 ).Estas unidades son CC que aún no han terminado todo el proceso de fijación para convertirse en operadores de modalidad epistémica. Su estructura sintáctica bascula 5 Vid Fuentes Rodríguez (en prensa) para completar este estudio.clac 62/2015, 174-198 fuentes: macrosintaxis 182 entre la construcción libre y la CC y nos plantean ciertas situaciones que queremos tratar a...

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Evidentials and Relevance

Abstract: Evidentials are expressions used to indicate the source of evidence and strength of speaker commitment to information conveyed.

Cited by 222 publications

References 36 publications

Evidentiality in language and cognition

Evidentiality in language and cognition

Manipulative uses of pragmatic markers in political discourse

Macrosintaxis de las "comment clauses": rasgos prototípicos y construcciones intermedias

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