“Watching for witness”

Evidential strategies and epistemic authority in Garrwa conversation

Ilana Mushin | University of Queensland

Linguistic forms with dedicated evidential meanings have been described for a number of Australian languages (eg. Donaldson 1980, Laughren 1982, Wilkins 1989) but there has been little written on how these are used in social interaction. This paper examines evidential strategies in ordinary Garrwa conversations, by taking into account what we know more generally about the status of knowledge and epistemic authority in Aboriginal societies, and applying this understanding to account for the ways knowledge is managed in ‘ordinary’ interactions.

Keywords: evidentiality, Australian Aboriginal languages, epistemic authority, conversation, Garrwa

Published online: 12 October 2012
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.3.2.07mus

Cited by

Cited by 12 other publications

Besnard, Anne-Laure

2017. In Evidentiality Revisited [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 271], ► pp. 249 ff.

Celle, Agnès

2018. J. I. Marίn Arrese, G. Haβler, & M. Carretero (Eds.). Evidentiality revisited: Cognitive grammar, functional and discourse-pragmatic perspectives . Review of Cognitive Linguistics 16:2 ► pp. 519 ff.

Hidalgo-Downing, Laura

2017. In Evidentiality Revisited [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 271], ► pp. 225 ff.

Hidalgo-Downing, Laura

2017. Stance and intersubjective positioning across scientific discourse genres: Negative and modal epistemic discourse strategies. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 13:1

Khachaturyan, Maria

2019. Knowing Is Belonging: Recognitional Deixis and Emergence of Common Ground in Religious Conversion. Signs and Society 7:2 ► pp. 186 ff.

Neldner, Karri, Ilana Mushin & Mark Nielsen

2017. Young children’s tool innovation across culture: Affordance visibility matters. Cognition 168 ► pp. 335 ff.

Nielsen, Mark, Ilana Mushin, Keyan Tomaselli & Andrew Whiten

2014. Where Culture Takes Hold: “Overimitation” and Its Flexible Deployment in Western, Aboriginal, and Bushmen Children. Child Development ► pp. n/a ff.

Nielsen, Mark, Ilana Mushin, Keyan Tomaselli & Andrew Whiten

2016. Imitation, Collaboration, and Their Interaction Among Western and Indigenous Australian Preschool Children. Child Development 87:3 ► pp. 795 ff.

Rozumko, Agata

2019. Between acknowledgement and countering: Interpersonal functions of English reportative adverbs. Journal of Pragmatics 140 ► pp. 1 ff.

Rozumko, Agata

2019. Evidential strategies in receiver-directed talk: The case of English inferential adverbs. Lingua 220 ► pp. 1 ff.

San Roque, Lila

2019. Evidentiality. Annual Review of Anthropology 48:1 ► pp. 353 ff.

Wilks, Matti, Jonathan Redshaw, Ilana Mushin & Mark Nielsen

2019. A cross-cultural investigation of children’s willingness to imitate prosocial and antisocial groups. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 185 ► pp. 164 ff.

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