Seminar Series: Abstract

4.00pm
June 11 2009
Seminar Room C

It's anyone's guess: locating ‘knowers’ in Duna epistemic morphology
Lila San Roque

Duna (Southern Highlands Province, PNG) has a rich array of bound morphemes that encode the semantic domain of ‘epistemic assessment’, that is, how a proposition or participant is known and what kind of knowledge it represents. Epistemic assessment morphemes evoke ‘knowers’, people from whose epistemic viewpoint the denoted situation or thing is expressed. In this talk I outline some of the difficulties I have had in figuring out who these knowers are understood to be, focussing on one set of Duna epistemic morphemes, the evidential markers. I conclude that evidence is encoded morphologically as either belonging to a specific individual (‘personal’), or being available to unspecified potential knowers (‘impersonal’). As markers of propositions, personal evidentials typically locate the speaker as knower in declaratives and the addressee as knower in interrogatives. As markers of NPs, they typically encode the epistemic viewpoint of addressees.