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date: 18 February 2019

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter presents a sketch of the grammatical evidential system and related epistemic meanings in Gitksan, a critically endangered indigenous language of the Tsimshianic language family spoken in the northwest interior of Canada. A number of basic syntactic and semantic tests utilizing presupposition, negation, and dissent are applied that provide a nuanced description of the meanings of the individual evidentials. A specific feature of the Gitksan evidentials which is examined in detail involves how they can be used to express epistemic modality, and how a speaker’s choice of which evidential to use in a particular speech context is conditioned by her evaluation of the information acquired in that context. One of the effects of this choice is the expression of what can be translated as modal force.

Keywords: epistemic modality, modal force, presupposition, Tsimshianic, Gitksan, embeddability, negation and dissent, semantic tests, syntactic tests

Tyler Peterson

Tyler Peterson received his PhD from the University of British Columbia in 2010 and joined the University of Auckland School of Cultures, Languages, and Linguistics in 2016. After completing a post doctoral project at Leiden University and a visiting professor position at the University of Toronto, he was the interim head of the Native American Masters Program at the University of Arizona. While there he worked with various tribal groups in the American Southwest in training community language activists in language documentation and policy. He has undertaken extensive fieldwork on the endangered indigenous language Gitksan (Tsimshianic, British Columbia), and has also worked with the Tupian languages in the Brazilian Amazon. His primary interests are in the study of semantics and pragmatics, and the development of field methodologies that probe these kinds of meanings.

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