Monday, October 15th @ 3 PM, Harper 140

Amawaka Speakers’ Creative Uses of Morphosyntactic Variation in Cultural Context

Abstract: 

The 250 to 300 remaining speakers of Amawaka reside in the Western Amazonian lowlands along either side of the border that divides Peru and Brazil. Residents of most Amawaka villages serendipitously juxtapose (1) a reified system of culturally licensed knowledge practices, and (2) the Amawaka language, whose mandatory evidential morphemes and split ergative case marking system arbitrarily require speakers to express their judgments about both the quality and the sources of referential information that they present through speech acts. Thus, by happenstance, whether speakers of Amawaka engage in epistemological or linguistic practices, they often manifest either practice of the pair in performing the other.

Since the advent of Labov’s series of pioneering studies, sociolinguists have continued to demonstrate that language forms parallel social identities in macro-level structures. While these contributions are undeniably important for the larger field of linguistics, this dominant approach in the sub-discipline eschews questions of why and through which processes such correlations arise. Moreover, few sociolinguistics studies address micro-level issues about how speakers might creatively employ language variation to achieve their own goals. In order to account for these unaddressed issues, then, it is necessary to expand the focus of contemporary sociolinguistics by incorporating theoretical advancements from both formal linguistics and anthropology.

Linguists and anthropologists (e.g., Duranti 1993) have established that speakers of a given language can employ its contingent morphosyntactic elements not only to reflect, but also to entail the very states of affairs that their uses more generally signify in cultural context. In this talk, I present multiply and overtly connected preliminary evidence of Amawaka speakers’ uses of evidentiality and split ergativity. With it, I aim toward explaining how Amawaka speakers, in the very process of discursively disseminating knowledge in cultural contexts, creatively employ their language’s grammatically mandatory epistemological forms to entail that publicly circulated knowledge is construed to be relatively more, or relatively less factual within a small-scale society. This study will potentially expose implicit assumptions that limit linguists’ analyses of evidentiality. It will also potentially illuminate the dynamic interrelationships between individual speakers’ uses of language, and socially-situated fields of knowledge practices.