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Browsing by Subject "evidentiality"

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  • The interaction of negation and evidentiality : A typology of not knowing what happened and knowing what did not 
    Calame, Héloïse (2024)
    Research on negation and evidentiality has seen a significant increase in the last decades, both from a typological perspective and for specific languages. The interaction of both domains with other categories has been investigated (e.g. Aikhenvald 2004, Miestamo 2005). However, the interaction of evidentiality with negation is heavily understudied. Apart from a few mentions (e.g. de Haan 1997) and language-specific analyses, I am not aware of comparative research on the topic. The present study analyses and draws a comparative picture of how clausal negation and grammatical evidentiality interact cross-linguistically. Semantically, there are two possibilities, illustrated in example (1) with a visual source of evidence (expressed lexically due to the characteristics of the English language) and the negator: in (1a), the proposition is negated, and in (1b), the source of evidence is negated. (1) a. ‘I see that it is not raining.’ b. ‘I do not see that it is raining.’ Since negation is a function universally grammaticalized in natural languages (Dahl 1979: 79), but grammatical evidentiality is only found in around a fourth of the world’s languages (Aikhenvald 2004: 1), the typological sample for this study contains languages that are known to have at least one evidential. De Haan’s typological study of evidentiality for the World Atlas of Language Structures (2013a) provides a good basis for sampling: the sample for the present study contains one language per family classified by de Haan as having evidentials, adding up to 70. In order to show maximal variety, languages known to be of interest for this phenomenon are also discussed, such as Akha (Aikhenvald 2004) and Cheyenne (Murray 2016). All in all, this study shows that the interaction of negation and evidentiality is of interest both from semantic as well as morphosyntactic points of view, and as much for language-specific research as for typological studies. It gives an overview of the diversity of interactions between negation and evidentiality, and their frequency in the 70-language sample. In short, it is a typology of not knowing what happened and knowing what did not.
  • Typology and stability of evidentiality in language contact situations 
    Hyvönen, Anu (2024)
    This thesis examines the typology and stability of evidentiality in contact settings. The goal is to estimate the stability of evidentiality in different contact scenarios, and to find whether evidential structures are more likely to change in language contact situations than to remain stable. Furthermore, this study aims to develop methodology to approach the typology of evidentiality to examine its contact effects in the first place. Earlier research has described evidentiality as an unstable feature that diffuses easily in contact situations, but systematic research examining evidentiality in multiple contact settings and its stability in contact is yet lacking. Moreover, evidentiality has been studied widely, but there is no previous typological approach on evidentiality or on its contact effects that would be suitable for the purposes of this thesis. This study takes a typological approach to the study of evidentiality and language contact. The examination of contact effects is based on six sampling units of three-language sets across the globe, wherein contact effects are estimated on an external benchmark. The collected linguistic data from the sampling units was analyzed into logical outcomes of contact and turned into probability distributions. This finally resulted in the aggregated probability of convergence. The probability of convergence is contrasted to the stability of evidentiality and in that continuum this study estimates how likely it is that evidentiality has been affected due to contact. Furthermore, this thesis focuses on finding a suitable way to approach the first research goal and therefore presents a typological approach on evidentiality and defines grammatical evidentiality. The primary results of this study suggest high probability of convergence and evidentiality seems to be an unstable linguistic domain that diffuses easily. These findings were further contrasted to some other linguistic domains indicating that evidentiality is among the most unstable domains. This study also suggests that the semantic properties of evidentiality are more unstable than the morphological ones. The findings also highlight the sensitivity of the methodology, and these limitations are demonstrated and reflected upon.

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