A Historical View of Evidentiality and Illocutionary Mood in Cheyenne
Presentation Type
Oral Presentation
Category
Social Sciences/Humanities
Abstract/Artist Statement
Abstract: Cheyenne, an indigenous language spoken in South Eastern Montana, obligatorily encodes source of information in statements (Murray 2016). This feature, called evidentiality, requires speakers to reveal how they know what they know. In other words, listeners are always savvy to whether they are being told a first-hand account, a rumor, a common-sense truth, or speculation. In Cheyenne, evidential markers appear as a suffix on main verbs, and are mutually exclusive with illocutionary mood markers, which indicate sentence type (declarative, imperative, interrogative, etc.). This means that on any given main verb, either an evidential marker or illocutionary mood marker will be used as a suffix, but never both.
Dr. Sarah Murray proposed in a 2016 paper that evidentiality and illocutionary mood form a fused morphological and semantic category in Cheyenne, called mode, accounting for the fact that they never appear together. Conversely, I argue that the two are in fact distinct morphological categories and that their lack of co-occurrence may be explained by their historical development. I propose a historical analysis of this phenomenon which may account for the lack of overlap between these two markers, outlining a possible pathway by which they came to their current distribution. My presentation reveals the importance of diachronic linguistics (the investigation of languages across time) as a tool to gain richer understanding of these features by revealing not just their current distribution, but how they came to be used as they currently are.
Mentor Name
McKenna Flannigan
A Historical View of Evidentiality and Illocutionary Mood in Cheyenne
UC 331
Abstract: Cheyenne, an indigenous language spoken in South Eastern Montana, obligatorily encodes source of information in statements (Murray 2016). This feature, called evidentiality, requires speakers to reveal how they know what they know. In other words, listeners are always savvy to whether they are being told a first-hand account, a rumor, a common-sense truth, or speculation. In Cheyenne, evidential markers appear as a suffix on main verbs, and are mutually exclusive with illocutionary mood markers, which indicate sentence type (declarative, imperative, interrogative, etc.). This means that on any given main verb, either an evidential marker or illocutionary mood marker will be used as a suffix, but never both.
Dr. Sarah Murray proposed in a 2016 paper that evidentiality and illocutionary mood form a fused morphological and semantic category in Cheyenne, called mode, accounting for the fact that they never appear together. Conversely, I argue that the two are in fact distinct morphological categories and that their lack of co-occurrence may be explained by their historical development. I propose a historical analysis of this phenomenon which may account for the lack of overlap between these two markers, outlining a possible pathway by which they came to their current distribution. My presentation reveals the importance of diachronic linguistics (the investigation of languages across time) as a tool to gain richer understanding of these features by revealing not just their current distribution, but how they came to be used as they currently are.