Evidential Implicaturesin Cuzco Quechua

MPI lunch talkMartina Faller, MPI & KUN

Overview

Background on evidentiality Quechua evidentials and their

implicatures Levinson’s heuristics for calculating

generalized conversational implicatures How to calculate evidential implicatures Proposal: evidential heuristics Implications for the Theory of GCIs

Quechua

Quechua is a language family spoken throughout the Andes by approximately 8 million people (Lefebvre & Muysken 1988)

Data used in Faller (2002) collected in Cusco, Peru. Peru has around 4 million Quechua speakers (Cerrón-Palomino 1987)

Quechua is an agglutinative language

Evidentiality

the encoding of the speaker’s grounds for making a speech act

in assertions: speaker’s type of source of information

an evidential is a grammatical marker of evidentiality

Three main types of Evidentiality

Direct evidence Reportative evidence Inferential evidence

Indirect evidence

Willett (1988)

Epistemic Modality

The encoding of the speaker’s judgment of a proposition as true or false with a certain degree of certainty.

English epistemic modals: must, may

Epistemic Modality

Possibility Necessity

Inference Report Direct

Evidentiality

Epistemic Modality

Possibility Necessity =

Epistemic Modality & Evidentiality Overlap

Based on Auwera and Plungian (1998)

Quechua evidential paradigm

Para-sha-nrain-prog-3‘It is raining.’

Direct:

-mi

No evidential:Reportative:

-si

Conjectural:

-chá

Quechua evidentials as illocutionary modifiers Any assertion has the sincerity

condition that the speaker believes p

Quechua evidentials add a sincerity condition specifying how the speaker came to believe p

Quechua evidentials as illocutionary modifiers

Para-sha-n.

rain-prog-3

p=‘It is raining.’

Sinc: {Bel(p)}

Para-sha-n-mi.

rain-prog-3

p=‘It is raining.’

Sinc: {Bel(p), Dir(p)}

I. Absence of evidential:

Para-sha-n rain-prog-3‘It is raining.’ +> Direct

evidence

II. Presence of indirect evidential

Para-sha-n-si/-chárain-prog-3‘It is raining.’ +> ¬ Direct

evidence

Two types of evidential implicatures

Generalized Conversational Implicatures GCI’s increase the informativeness

of the coded/entailed content of a sentence in a predictable and regular way from the “structure of utterances, given the structure of the language, and not by virtue of the particular contexts of utterance” (Levinson 2000).

Generalized Conversational Implicatures In contrast to the coded meaning,

GCI’s are only preferred interpretations, which in certain circumstances can be cancelled or blocked.

The Q-Heuristic

“What is saliently not said, is not the case.”

The Q-heuristic is related to Grice’s first maxim of Quantity: “Make your contribution as informative as required (for the current purposes of the exchange)”

The Q-Heuristic

operates on paradigmatic expressions, which can be ordered according to degree of informativeness:

< Strong, Weak >

The Q-Heuristic

Example: < all, some >

(a) All tigers are fierce.

(b) Some tigers are fierce.

(a) is more informative than (b), because (a) entails (b)

The Q-Heuristic

“What is saliently not said is not the case”

< all, some >

Some tigers are fierce.

Q+> not all tigers are fierce.

The I-Heuristic

“Unmarked, minimal expressions warrant interpretations to the stereotypical extensions.

related to Grice’s second Maxim of Quantity: “Do not make your contribution more informative than required.”

The I-Heuristic

I-implicatures enrich/narrow/strengthen what is said

Example:

boxer I+> male boxer

The M-Heuristic

“Marked message indicates marked situation.”

relates to Grice’s Maxim of Manner “Be perspicous” Example:

(a) Bill stopped the car. I+> normally(b) Bill caused the car to stop. M+> not normally

Maxim of Quality

Quality I: Do not say what you believe to be false

Quality II: Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence

Maxim of Quality

Levinson does not propose any heuristics relating to the Maxim of Quality

The maxim of quality is mainly appealed to for implicatures that arise from flouting it:A: Tehran's in Turkey, isn't it, teacher? B: And London's in Armenia, I suppose.

Implicating Direct Evidence Absence of evidential:

Para-sha-n

rain-prog-3

‘It is raining.’ +> Direct evidence

Is the DE-implicature a GCI?

Implicating Direct Evidence Direct evidence implicature can be

overridden by context:

...triciclu-n-ta-qa tari-ra-ka-pu-n.

...tricycle-3-acc-top find-hort-rfl-ben-3

`...they found his tricycle.’

Implicating Direct Evidence A sentence can only have a single

evidential value. If evidential-less sentences encoded the

value direct, it should be impossible to add an indirect evidential.

Para-sha-n-si/-chá

rain-prog-3

‘It is raining.’

Implicating Direct Evidence GCIs usually can be cancelled overtly:

‘Some tigers are fierce, in fact all of them are.’

the DE-implicature cannot be cancelled.Para-sha-n, ichaqa mana riku-ni-chu

rain-prog-3 but not see-1-neg

‘It is raining, but I did not see (it).’ This is not surprising, however, since the DE-

implicature is illocutionary

Which heuristic is responsible for the DE-implicature? Q-heuristic operates on overt

linguistic expressions. The M-heuristic operates on

marked expressions; evidential-less sentences are not marked.

Therefore, neither Q nor M can be responsible

Which heuristic is responsible for the DE-implicature? The DE-implicature does

narrow/strengthen what is said so, is it an I-implicature?

But reportative or conjectural evidence would also be potential enrichments.

Which heuristic is responsible for the DE-implicature? Principle of Informativeness: if an

utterance has competing interpretations, the “best” one is the most informative one (Atlas and Levinson 1981).

Is direct evidence more informative than reportative or conjectural?

Not if informativeness is defined as entailment

Calculating the DE-implicature Direct evidence is stronger than

indirect evidence. Addressee can assume that speaker

bases an assertion on the strongest type of evidence available to him or her.

If no type of evidence is overtly expressed, direct evidence is implicated.

Implicating absence of DE

Indirect evidentials implicate the absence of direct evidence:

Para-sha-n-si/-chá

rain-prog-3

‘It is raining.’ +> ¬ Direct evidence

The ¬ DE-implicature arises in other languages with evidentials (de Haan 1998)

Implicating absence of DE

De Haan: ¬DE implicature is calculated on the basis of a universal evidential hierarchy:

Direct > Inferential > Reportative

Ordering criterion: speaker preference

Is the ¬DE implicature a Q-implicature?

Implicating the absence of DE De Haan’s hierarchy is not valid for

Quechua. Instead:

Direct -mi > Reportative -siDirect -mi > Conjectural -chá

If the ¬DE implicature is a Q-implicature, then sentences with -mi should entail the same sentences with -si or -chá

Implicating the absence of DE

Para-sha-n-mi.

rain-prog-3

p=‘It is raining.’

Sinc: {Bel(p), Dir(p)}

Para-sha-n-si.

rain-prog-3

p=‘It is raining.’

Sinc: {Bel(p), Rep(p)}

Trivially, a sentence S with -mi entails S with -si — but also vice versa. Moreover, this entailment relation does not include the evidential value

Implicating the absence of DE

Para-sha-n-mi.

rain-prog-3

p=‘It is raining.’

Sinc: {Bel(p), Dir(p)}

Para-sha-n-si.

rain-prog-3

p=‘It is raining.’

Sinc: {Bel(p), Rep(p)}

Relevant notion is illocutionary entailment: speech act A entails B, if A cannot be performed without also performing B (Vanderveken 1990).

Implicating the absence of DE

Para-sha-n-mi.

rain-prog-3

p=‘It is raining.’

Sinc: {Bel(p), Dir(p)}

Para-sha-n-si.

rain-prog-3

p=‘It is raining.’

Sinc: {Bel(p), Rep(p)}

The sentence with -mi does not illocutionary entail the sentence with -si or -chá

Implicating the absence of DE The evidential scales are not

ordered in terms of informativeness.

The ¬DE-implicature is not a Q-implicature.

Again, the revelant notion is strength of evidence

Proposal: Evidential Heuristics Both the DE- and the ¬DE-

implicature are arise because direct evidence is stronger than reportative or conjectural evidence.

They exploit Grice’s second Maxim of Quality: “Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.”

Proposal: Evidential Heuristics E(vidential-)S(trength)-Heuristic:

Saliently not indicated types of evidence are not available to the speaker

This heuristic operates on paradigms ordered by degree of strength of evidence:

Direct -mi > Reportative -siDirect -mi > Conjectural -chá

Proposal: Evidential Heuristics E(vidential-)S(trength)-Heuristic:

Saliently not indicated types of evidence are not available to the speaker

Para-sha-n-si/-chá

rain-prog-3

‘It is raining.’ +> ¬ Direct evidence

Proposal: Evidential Heuristics E(vidential-)E(nrichment)-Heuristic:

Unmarked, minimal expressions warrant interpretations to the evidentially richest/strongest extension.

Para-sha-n.

rain-prog-3

‘It is raining.’ +> Direct evidence

Implications for Theory of GCIs The EE-implicature is not universal:

‘It is raining.’

does not implicate that the speaker saw it rain.

Implications for Theory of GCIs EE-implicature hypothesis:

evidential zero marking only gives rise to the DE-implicature in languages that encode evidentiality paradigmatically.

Implications for Theory of GCIs Generalized Zero-marking-implicature

hypothesis:a. Zero marking implicates a value for feature X just in case there is a linguistic paradigm encoding the values of X.b. Given a linguistc paradigm for X, zero marking implicates the super value of X.

Implications for Theory of GCIs Levinson’s heuristics all operate on

the propositional content of an utterance.

Quantity and Manner maxims relate to information

The evidential heuristics operate on the illocutionary level of an utterance

Quality maxims relate to sincerity

Implications for Theory of GCIs A chicken and egg problem?

Do languages have certain morphosyntactic devices because their speakers adhere to the related heuristic, or

Do speake’s adhere to certain heuristics, because they happen to have the morphosyntactic devices?