Investigating Evidentials

All languages have ways of expressing evidentiality, of encoding an individual's source of information. Across languages, information source can be direct (e.g., visual, auditory) or indirect (e.g., based on reports, inference, conjecture). Yet languages vary in how they encode this information and what properties evidential constructions have -- evidentiality can be grammatically marked on every sentence but it can also be lexically or contextually expressed. In addition, evidential constructions vary with how they interact with other linguistic phenomena, for example sentence type and modality. 

 

In this talk, I discuss the investigation of evidentiality, from working with speakers, to looking at texts and existing language documentation, to incorporating linguistic diagnostics. I'll include examples of evidentiality from various languages including Cheyenne (Algonquian: Montana and Oklahoma), building on my work since 2006 as well as a recent NSF grant with Chief Dull Knife College (CDKC), the Northern Cheyenne tribal college, to develop a collection of Cheyenne language texts located at CDKC. 

 

Presenter: Sarah Murray is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Cornell University, as well as affiliated faculty in American Indian and Indigenous Studies, Cognitive Science, and Philosophy. She is currently the director of the Cognitive Science Program and the director of the Cornell Language Documentation Lab. Her research combines cross-linguistic semantics and pragmatics with community-based language work. Since 2006, she has been working with Chief Dull Knife College and the Northern Cheyenne community in Montana on a variety of language projects.