Dizque, evidentiality, and stance in Valley Spanish

Abstract

A B S T R A C T While information sources have largely been treated as transparent categories in the literature on evidentiality, understandings of information source can be culturally and situationally variable. This article proposes that the strictly linguistic information encoded in reportative evidentials cannot be cleanly separated from social infl uences. Defi ning an information source, especially when referring to information reported by another person, serves social purposes, such as casting doubt, framing gossip, distancing oneself, or indicating empathy. Using the concept of speaker stance, this study explores the relationship of information source to the interpersonal relationships and interactions that are encoded in this linguistic form. Data from a contact variety of Spanish spoken in central Bolivia provide evidence that diz(que) , a Spanish word, has undergone infl uence from Quechua to become a systematic reportative evidential marker in this variety of Bolivian Spanish. Speakers use information source marking in order to shade subtleties of relationships and authority. (Evidentiality, speaker stance, Andean Spanish, Bolivian Spanish, language contact, linguistic anthropology) * I n t r o d u c t i o nEvidentials can be described as grammatical or lexical markers that provide information about the source of information for a particular utterance or proposition. Evidentials are used to connect the content of a message to its provenance, to specify where a particular piece of information comes from. reportative evidentials are used to mark information that was verbally reported by another person -that is, secondhand knowledge or hearsay. Like classic cases of overlap between social and structural aspects of language, such as pronoun distinctions (Brown & Gilman 1960 ), reportative evidentials are linguistic markers that refer to a social interaction or relationship. In connecting reference and subjectivity, evidentials constitute a liminal area between formal linguistics and sociolinguistics/linguistic anthropology. In this article, I investigate the relationship between the social and grammatical

Dizque: Epistemics blurring evidentials in Mexican Spanish

“…The case of Mexican Spanish may show a divergent path from previous characterizations where reported speech or hearsay is the core meaning of the marker (Travis, 2006;Babel, 2009). We show that in contemporary Mexican Spanish, evidential reportatives are encoded through other markers, namely que, que dizque and, to a lesser extent dizque and quesque.…”

“…Dizque 'supposedly, allegedly' (developed from the verb decir 'say' and the complementizer que) has been analyzed as a purely evidential marker (reported speech and hearsay) with a notion of doubt implied in some contexts (Travis, 2006;Babel, 2009).…”

“…Despite the agreement on the meaning diversity of the form, most of the scholars claim that its core meaning is still the evidential-reportative (Olbertz, 2005;Travis, 2006;Babel, 2009). Some authors have attributed the reportative meaning of dizque to a contact situation in which a grammatical transfer occurs as in the case of Ecuadorian and Bolivian Spanish that share grounds with Quechua (Babel, 2009;Olbertz, 2005).…”

“…Some authors have attributed the reportative meaning of dizque to a contact situation in which a grammatical transfer occurs as in the case of Ecuadorian and Bolivian Spanish that share grounds with Quechua (Babel, 2009;Olbertz, 2005). Since Quechua is a language in which the source of information is obligatorily marked via morphemes, bilingual speakers transfer this feature into an existent form in Spanish, namely, dizque.…”

‘Collaborative Competition’: Stance-taking and Positioning in the European Parliament

“…With regards to studies in evidentially across languages (Babel, 2009;Demonte and Fernández-Soriano, 2013;Travis, 2006) been said that it was inevitable that Islamic fundamentalists would take over power democratically' not only through a passive formulation but also by adding, the adverb 'etcetera' in place of a further report. Etcetera, following a narrative account indicates that the utterance completion is 'projectable', in conversation analytic terms (Jefforson, 1991, p. 73) with reference to the grounding accomplished in the utterance prior to etcetera (in Line 4).…”