News

May 15, 2019

If you intend to attend the workshop, please complete the registration form.

Participation in the workshop is free of charge, but registration is necessary so we know how many people to expect at the workshop sessions and social events.

May 15, 2019

The program is now available.

Invited Speakers (confirmed)

Evidential restrictions cross-cut grammars in varied ways. Traditionally, evidentiality has been understood as a linguistic category that encodes the information source for an utterance (Aikhenvald 2004). A lot of current research within formal semantics and pragmatics follows the typological suit and focuses on evidential paradigms in e.g. Cuzco Quechua (Faller 2002), Lillouet Salish (Matthewson et al. 2007) and Cheyenne (Murray 2010). However, despite their paradigmatic status, not all evidentials even in those languages function identically from a semantic standpoint (AnderBois 2014, Korotkova 2017). Furthermore, there are evidentials that do not form a dedicated morphosyntactic category, such as Tagalog daw (Schwager 2010) and German wohl (Zimmerman 2004, Eckardt and Beltrama forth.), or evidentials that are part of another category, such as the tense and aspect system in Bulgarian (Izvorski 1997; Koev 2016). Finally, many constructions that are not strictly speaking evidentials have been argued to have an evidential flavor: from epistemic modals (von Fintel and Gillies 2010) over hedges (Simons 2007, McCready 2015), copy-raising constructions (Asudeh and Toivonen 2012) and quotational indefinites (Sudo 2008, Cieschinger and Ebert 2011, Koev 2016) to predicates of personal taste (Anand and Korotkova 2018).

In this workshop, we want to bring together researchers working from different angles on how natural language expresses evidence. We are especially interested in (but not limited to) submissions that straddle the divide between linguistics and philosophy and address the following issues:

  1. Evidentiality across syntactic categories
  2. Speech acts conveyed by evidentials
  3. Evidentiality in a broader context of attitude ascriptions and subjective expressions
  4. Types of reasoning and knowledge involved in statements with different evidentials
  5. Formal tools for modelling evidence

Organizers & contact

Natasha Korotkova, Todor Koev, Sven Lauer and Regine Eckardt.

Please direct any inquiries to expressing-evidence@uni-konstanz.de.

Important dates

A call for papers has been published.

  • Deadline for submissions: December 15 20, 2018
  • Notification of acceptance: February 10, 2019
  • Workshop: June 6 – 8, 2019

Code of conduct

We expect all participants in the workshop to adhere to the LSA’s civility policy (though we wish to emphasize that our workshop is in no way an “LSA-sponsored event”). During, before, or after the event, we encourage you to report any violations of this set of rules to any of the organizers. If you mention “(code of) conduct” or “civility policy” or just that you want to speak privately to any of us, we will provide a safe space where you can speak freely. Any communication in this space will be treated as absolutely confidential. Please also make use of this opportunity if are not sure whether conduct is in violation of the rules: Even possible violations need to be addressed.

References

Aikhenvald, 2004.
Evidentiality. Oxford University Press.
Anand and Korotkova (2018).
Acquaintance content and obviation. Sinn und Bedeutung 22.
AnderBois, 2014.
On the exceptional status of reportative evidentials. Semantics and Linguistic Theory 24.
Asudeh and Toivonen, 2012.
Copy raising and perception. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 30(2).
Cieschinger and Ebert (2011).
Doubling definite determiners in German. Linguistische Berichte 226.
Eckardt and Beltrama, forthcoming.
Evidentials and questions. Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics 12.
Faller, 2002.
Semantics and pragmatics of evidentials in Cuzco Quechua. PhD dissertation, Stanford University.
von Fintel and Gillies, 2010.
Must … stay … strong! Natural Language Semantics 18(4).
Izvorski, 1997.
The present perfect as an epistemic modal. Semantics and Linguistic Theory 7.
Koev, 2016.
Evidentiality, learning events and spatiotemporal distance: The view from Bulgarian. Journal of Semantics 34(1).
Korotkova 2017.
Evidentials and (relayed) speech acts: Hearsay as quotation. Proceedings of SALT 25.
Matthewson, Davis and Rullman, 2007.
Evidentials as epistemic modals: Evidence from St’át’imcets. Linguistic Variation Yearbook 7.
McCready, 2007.
Reliability in Pragmatics. Oxford University Press.
Murray, 2010.
Evidentiality and the structure of speech acts. PhD dissertation, Rutgers University.
Schwager, 2010.
On what has been said in Tagalog: Reportative daw. Evidence from Evidentials.
Simons (2007).
Observations on embedding verbs, evidentiality, and presupposition. Lingua 117(6).
Sudo (2008).
Quantification into quotations: evidence from Japanese whdoublets. Sinn und Bedeutung 12.
Zimmerman, 2004.
Discourse particles in the left periphery. ZAS Papers in Linguistics 35.