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Evidential Implicatures in Cuzco Quechua

Evidential Implicatures in Cuzco Quechua. MPI lunch talk Martina 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

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Evidential Implicatures in Cuzco Quechua

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  1. Evidential Implicatures in Cuzco Quechua MPI lunch talk Martina Faller, MPI & KUN

  2. 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

  3. 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

  4. 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

  5. Indirect evidence Three main types of Evidentiality • Direct evidence • Reportative evidence • Inferential evidence Willett (1988)

  6. 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

  7. Epistemic Modality & Evidentiality Overlap Epistemic Modality Possibility Necessity Epistemic Modality Possibility Necessity = Inference Report Direct Evidentiality Based on Auwera and Plungian (1998)

  8. Direct: Reportative: Conjectural: -mi -si -chá Quechua evidential paradigm Para-sha-n rain-prog-3 ‘It is raining.’ No evidential:

  9. 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

  10. 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)} Quechua evidentials as illocutionary modifiers

  11. Two types of evidential implicatures I. Absence of evidential: Para-sha-n rain-prog-3 ‘It is raining.’ +> Direct evidence II. Presence of indirect evidential Para-sha-n-si/-chá rain-prog-3 ‘It is raining.’ +> ¬ Direct evidence

  12. 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).

  13. Generalized Conversational Implicatures • In contrast to the coded meaning, GCI’s are only preferred interpretations, which in certain circumstances can be cancelled or blocked.

  14. 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)”

  15. The Q-Heuristic • operates on paradigmatic expressions, which can be ordered according to degree of informativeness: < Strong, Weak >

  16. 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)

  17. The Q-Heuristic “What is saliently not said is not the case” < all, some > Some tigers are fierce. Q+> not all tigers are fierce.

  18. 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.”

  19. The I-Heuristic • I-implicatures enrich/narrow/strengthen what is said • Example: boxerI+> male boxer

  20. 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

  21. 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

  22. 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.

  23. Implicating Direct Evidence • Absence of evidential: Para-sha-n rain-prog-3 ‘It is raining.’ +> Direct evidence • Is the DE-implicature a GCI?

  24. 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.’

  25. 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.’

  26. 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

  27. 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

  28. 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.

  29. 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

  30. 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.

  31. 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)

  32. 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?

  33. Implicating the absence of DE • De Haan’s hierarchy is not valid for Quechua. Instead: Direct -mi > Reportative -si Direct -mi > Conjectural -chá • If the ¬DE implicature is a Q-implicature, then sentences with -mi should entail the same sentences with -si or -chá

  34. 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)} Implicating the absence of DE • Trivially, a sentence S with -mi entails S with -si — but also vice versa. • Moreover, this entailment relation does not include the evidential value

  35. 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)} Implicating the absence of DE • Relevant notion is illocutionary entailment: speech act A entails B, if A cannot be performed without also performing B (Vanderveken 1990).

  36. 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)} Implicating the absence of DE • The sentence with -mi does not illocutionary entail the sentence with -si or -chá

  37. 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

  38. 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.”

  39. 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 -si Direct -mi > Conjectural -chá

  40. 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

  41. 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

  42. Implications for Theory of GCIs • The EE-implicature is not universal: ‘It is raining.’ does not implicate that the speaker saw it rain.

  43. Implications for Theory of GCIs • EE-implicature hypothesis: evidential zero marking only gives rise to the DE-implicature in languages that encode evidentiality paradigmatically.

  44. 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.

  45. 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

  46. 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?

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