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Epistemic Meaning A Crosslinguistic and Functional-Cognitive Study

:	Kasper Boye
:	Epistemic Meaning A Crosslinguistic and Functional-Cognitive Study
:	De Gruyter Mouton
:	9783110219036
:	Empirical Approaches to Language Typology [EALT]ISSN
:	1
:	CHF 159.80
:

:	Allgemeine und Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft
:	English

:	390
:	Wasserzeichen/DRM
:	PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
:	PDF

This book deals with epistemic expressions: the linguistic means we have for expressing our degree of certainty about and our type of evidence for propositions about the world. It presents a cross-linguistic study of such expressions and demonstrates that they behave in a way that can be described in terms of a coherent but complex meaning domain. In order to account for this behaviour the book proposes to analyse epistemic meaning in terms of a coherent but complex cognitive structure which is bound up with our cognitive capacity for relating our conception of the world to the world.

Kasper Boye, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

	Acknowledgements	5
	List of figures	12
	List of tables	14
	List of abbreviations	15
	1. Preliminaries	19
	1.1. Introduction	19
	1.2. Overview of the book	24
	1.3. Theoretical basis	25
	1.3.1. Central assumptions	25
	1.3.2. Crosslinguistic descriptive categories	26
	1.4. Empirical basis	29
	1.5. The term epistemic in linguistics and philosophy	33
	1.6. Epistemic meanings and notions	36
	1.6.1. Evidential meanings and notions	37
	1.6.2. Epistemic modal meanings and notions	38
	1.6.3. Non-epistemic meanings and notions occasionally considered epistemic in the literature	49
	1.6.4. Overview of epistemic meanings and notions	53
	1.7. Precursors of the category of epistemicity	54
	1.7.1. Epistemic meaning variants	55
	1.7.2. Epistemic stance	57
	1.7.3. Language-specific groups of epistemic expressions	58
	1.7.4. The descriptive category of status	59
	1.7.5. Epistemic scales	61
	1.8. Summary of Chapter 1	65
	2. Epistemic systems	66
	2.1. Introduction	66
	2.1.1. Morphosyntactic systems	66
	2.1.2. The argument	67
	2.1.3. Overview of Chapter 2	70
	2.2. General epistemic systems across languages	70
	2.2.1. General epistemic systems in American languages	71
	2.2.2. General epistemic systems in non-American languages	91
	2.2.3. Evidential subsystems with epistemic modal extensions as general epistemic systems	106
	2.2.4. Other possible instances of general epistemic systems	107
	2.3. Epistemic subsystems across languages	113
	2.3.1. Evidential systems across languages	113
	2.3.2. Epistemic modal systems across languages	116
	2.3.3. Epistemic extensions of narrow-sense modal systems	125
	2.4. Several epistemic systems in one and the same language	127
	2.5. Epistemic expressions as a universal phenomenon	132
	2.5.1. Scattered coding of epistemic meaning	133
	2.5.2. Lexical coding of epistemic meaning	140
	2.6. Summary of Chapter 2	142
	3. A semantic map of epistemic expressions	144
	3.1. Introduction	144
	3.1.1. Semantic mapping	144
	3.1.2. The argument	146
	3.1.3. Overview of Chapter 3	147
	3.2. The map	148
	3.3. The crosslinguistic significance of the notional distinctions found in the map	149
	3.3.1. The distinction between direct and indirect justification	149
	3.3.2. The distinction between full, partial and neutral support	151
	3.3.3. The distinction between evidential and epistemic modal notions	154
	3.4. The crosslinguistic significance of the connecting lines found in the map	155
	3.4.1. Connecting line 1: The link between direct and indirect justification	156
	3.4.2. Connecting line 2: The link between full and partial support	158
	3.4.3. Connecting line 3: The link b