Epistemic modality and evidentiality in Gitksan at the semantics-pragmatics interface ...

• Main Author: Peterson, Tyler Roy Gösta
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2010
• Subjects: Canada; Tsimshian*
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0069730; https://doi.library.ubc.ca/10.14288/1.0069730

This dissertation provides an empirically driven, theoretically informed investigation of how speakers of Gitksan, a Tsimshianic language spoken in the northwest coast of Canada, express knowledge about the world around them. There are three main goals that motivate this investigation: The first is to provide the first detailed description of the evidential and modal system in Gitksan. The second is to provide a formal semantic and pragmatic account of this system that adequately explains the meanings of the modals and evidentials, as well as how they are used in discourse. The third goal is to examine the specific properties the Gitksan evidential/modal system brings to bear on current theories of semantics and pragmatics, as well as the consequences this analysis has on the study of modality and evidentiality cross-linguistically. In addition to documenting the evidential and modal meanings in Gitksan, I work through a variety of theoretical tools designed to determine what level of meaning the individual ...