Resum: Norms of human communication require our utterances to be evidence-based. We don’t just say things out of the blue—instead, they need to be justified in some way. The world’s languages have many devices to signal one’s knowledge and to justify a statement. The linguistic category of evidentiality, an overt marking of the source of information for an utterance (Aikhenvald 2018), is one such device. How is evidentiality related to norms of assertion (Pagin 2016; Williamson 2000)? Is evidential signal always part of the semantics, or is it due to pragmatics? How to best model evidential meaning? Can the properties of evidentials be derived from non-linguistic cognition? The class will address those questions through a focused examination of the linguistic behavior of evidentials—empirical landscape, theoretical advances, their connection to other categories dealing with epistemic commitments, thus summarizing the past two decades of research in this area within formal semantics and pragmatics (see overviews in Korotkova 2016b; Murray 2017): major views on evidentiality, the discourse status of information contributed by evidentials, perspectival properties of evidentials and the lack of commitment with hearsay evidentials. The goal of the class is twofold: a synthesis of often unrelated lines of research and a survey of unresolved issues. 

 

Organitza: GLiF (Grup de Lingüística Formal)