Studying Evidentials in Naturallyoccurring Speech: Why and How
Daniel J. Hintz
SIL International
Pre-Conference Workshop
“Documenting Evidentiality”
TNE, Leiden University, June 13, 2012
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Many slides by permission of Diane Hintz (2010):
“Transcribing Conversational Discourse.”
Invited talk (90 minutes) presented at SIL
Global Linguistics Forum, Vajta, Hungary.
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By way of introduction
Two of my research interests:
• Interaction of morphology, syntax, and
discourse
• TAME
We all gain from the contributions of
complementary approaches to the study
of evidentiality.
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Discourse-functional perspective
By discourse, I mean:
• naturally-occurring language in context
• that is, spoken, signed or written language
used by people to communicate in natural
settings (Cumming and Ono 1997:112), including:
– conversations,
– speeches,
– songs,
– stories, and
– prayers
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Discourse-functional perspective
By functional, I mean:
• Whenever two or more options are possible,
we look for an answer to the question,
“Why is that form used there?”
• In other words, when we notice grammatical
and lexical alternations in discourse, we try to
discover what the communicative functions are
of those alternations.
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Typological perspective
By typological, I mean:
• How linguistic systems are the same (universals), and how they are different (typology)
• Identifying the types of internal organization
attested across languages within a given
semantic domain (or grammatical category)
• Examining to what extent predicted correlates
of each type hold within a given language
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Studying spontaneous connected speech
1. Benefits of working on conversation
2. How to record natural conversation
3. How to choose a valuable segment to
transcribe
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1. Benefits of working on conversation
Why would it be valuable to work
on conversation?
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1. Benefits of working on conversation
It is the most common,
use of language.
We are getting the language in its most
natural setting when we record
ordinary, everyday talk.
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1. Benefits of working on conversation
“Face-to-face conversation is the primary
setting for language use—it was the
only setting for most of the history of
both humans and their languages.”
“The final arbiter of a theory or
model..must be whether or not it can
account for the acts that arise in
everyday language.” Clark & Bangerter 1996:45-6
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1. Benefits of working on conversation
Studying conversation opens up
new windows of understanding
on how a language works.
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1. Benefits of working on conversation
Conversation is social;
it is interactive,
and because of that, we see
morphemes, patterns and systems
not observable in monologue.
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1. Benefits of working on conversation
The answers to our most perplexing
linguistic problems
could very well lie in the study
of naturally-occurring conversation.
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1. Benefits of working on conversation
The better we understand
how the languages we are studying work,
the better will be our analyses
and theory.
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1. Benefits of working on conversation
We have many illustrations from
South Conchucos Quechua - Peru
—Here is one part of evidential system
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Additional evidential markers and enriched
understanding
• From a study of natural discourse
data, most of which was conversation
(Hintz 2006)
• The evidential system of SC Quechua
is made up of five enclitics.
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1.1 Additional evidential markers
• The forms are -mi, -cher, -cha:, -chi,
and -shi.
• Two of them, -cher and -cha:, only
appear in conversation.
• More frequent in dialogue than wellstudied -chi and -shi.
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1.2 An enriched understanding of the
evidential system
• Evidential value of -mi and -cha:
“best possible grounds for an utterance”
(cf. Faller 2002)
“So…what’s the relevant contrast?”
• They grammatically encode individual
knowledge vs. mutual knowledge.
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(Inter)personal
evidential meanings
Individual
knowledge
Best
-mi ‘I know…’
possible
grounds
Mutual
knowledge
-cha: ‘We all know…’ or
‘We’ve established
this together’
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Let’s look at a conversation
G: ‘So how was the festival? Was it good?’
R: ‘Yes, we had a beautiful, wonderful time (-mi).’
‘Very special (-mi).’
G: ‘Were there many dance groups?’
R: ‘Yes, two arpawanka goups (-cha:).’
‘And a yuriwa group (-cha:).’
‘And a= (-cha:) …’ (prosodic length)
‘There was a Pizarro drama (-mi).’
‘It was great (-mi)!’
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What’s going on here?
• In this conversation, Reina answers Guillermo’s
first question with two sentences marked with
-mi to relate her own personal experience.
• ‘best possible grounds, individual knowledge’
G: ‘So how was the festival? Was it good?’
R: ‘Yes, we had a beautiful, wonderful time (-mi).’
‘Very special (-mi).’
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Switch from -mi to -cha:
• For the second question, she switches to -cha:
because she knows that he knows that every
festival has arpawanka and yuriwa dancers.
• ‘best possible grounds, mutual knowledge’
G: ‘Were there many dance groups?’
R: ‘Yes, two arpawanka groups (-cha:).’
‘And a yuriwa group (-cha:).’
‘And a= (-cha:) …’ (prosodic length)
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Switch from -cha: back to -mi
• Reina pauses mid-sentence after -cha: (false
start), then switches back to -mi .
• Not every festival has a Pizarro drama, so it is
noteworthy. Guillermo couldn’t have known.
• She continues with -mi to provide her own
perspective/evaluation (his original question).
R: ‘And a (-cha:) …’ (.5 sec pause)
‘There was a Pizarro drama (-mi).’
‘It was great (-mi)!’
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By analyzing conversation:
• Identified a high frequency evidential
that does not occur in narrative (-cha:)
▪ -cha: is more frequent than -chi and -shi
• Discovered a component of the
evidential system not encountered
before:
▪ evidentials in SCQ encode individual
knowledge versus mutual knowledge.
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More benefits of conversation…
Evidential systems
• Crucial to understanding the interaction
of individual elements within the
evidential system as a whole
• Elicitation and narrative would not likely
provide us with examples of “evidential
clusters” like the Reina/Guillermo text
• Patterns that raise questions we
wouldn’t otherwise have considered
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More benefits of conversation…
Arguments and illustrations
• Enriched contexts can help make our
arguments more compelling
• Illustrations in our publications can be
more convincing than a bare verb
• Fellow researchers are less dependent
on our translations
• Examples are culturally relevant
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More benefits of conversation…
• Illuminates the issue of obligatoriness
• Extremely helpful for discovering and
understanding extended meanings
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Complementary approaches
• Observable differences between
spontaneous connected speech and
elicited data (monologue, legends,
interview, etc.)
• Comparison leads to fresh insights and
a deeper understanding of individual
markers and the system as a whole
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Another benefit—vernacular literature
• Directed native authors to spots where
-cha: would be likely to appear.
• To their surprise, they found their
languages do have a cognate
morpheme serving this purpose
(-chraq, -tsaq, -ta:, etc.).
• “We thought this was just an ‘adornment’, not found in Spanish. We didn’t
realize it had an important meaning.”
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Another benefit—vernacular literature
• They caught on to the system of how
the morpheme is used, a little different
in each language.
• Had a riot playing with it at coffee
break.
• Their work since has incorporated this
new understanding.
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Some findings from studying conversation:
• New evidential enclitics came to light
• Some mark individual knowledge,
• others mark mutual knowledge.
Without studying conversation,
would not have gained this knowledge.
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A challenge to all of us:
Let’s work on
and
monologue and
narrative
dialogue
too
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1. Benefits of working on conversation
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2. How to record natural conversation
• Most important—record a speech event
that is natural, interaction that occurred
without being elicited
• Let the talk take place “for its own sake
rather than for the benefit of the
investigator.” (Du Bois, Cumming, SchuetzeCoburn and Paolino 1992:8)
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2 How to record natural conversation
An effective way to do this:
• A mother tongue speaker (you or your
language consultant) takes the
recording device home.
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2 How to record natural conversation
An effective way to do this:
• She explains to her family about the
recording and gets their consent:
– Explains it will help you learn the language
and understand it better, and that some
segments could be published.
– Records their consent on the recording
device.
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2 How to record natural conversation
An effective way to do this:
• She places the recorder close to where
people will be speaking.
• She lets it run for hours, as long as the
batteries last. People will forget after a
while that the recorder is on.
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2 How to record natural conversation
An effective way to do this:
• You will get some long periods of
silence and also some completely
natural conversation.
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2 How to record natural conversation
• Have your language consultant take
steps to minimize the background
noise.
– Turn off the radio and the TV.
– Possibly even the refrigerator.
– Place the recorder away from the noises of
animals.
• Minimizing background noise will make
transcribing much easier, and the
transcription more accurate.
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3 How to choose a valuable segment
to transcribe
What is the first thing we do with the
valuable new recording?
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3 How to choose a valuable segment
to transcribe
• First, transfer the whole recording to a
permanent storage device and
Make a back-up.
• Then, listen to the whole recording
using a speech analysis program such
as Praat or Sound Forge.
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3 How to choose a valuable segment
to transcribe
• As you are listening, select and mark in
regions the parts that look especially
valuable.
• Of a 2-hour recording you may choose
to transcribe only a 5-minute segment
or two.
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3 How to choose a valuable segment
to transcribe
What makes a segment valuable?
• It is transcribable. You can hear the
voices clearly.
• Two or three people are talking.
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3 How to choose a valuable segment
to transcribe
What makes a segment valuable?
• The talk is lively and there is some
overlap.
• Best segments are not generally at the
beginning of the recording. The more
natural speech occurs after people have
forgotten about the recorder.
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What we’ve learned
• Studying conversational discourse can
yield many benefits
• The new discoveries we make by
studying conversation help us to
produce more fine-grained analyses.
• If we don’t work on conversation, we
may miss grammatical markers,
patterns and systems that are part of
the language.
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What we’ve learned
• We’ve also talked about:
– How to record natural discourse
– What to consider in choosing a
segment to transcribe
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Resources and references
Clark, Herbert H. & Adrian Bangerter. 2004. Changing ideas
about reference. In I. Noveck & D. Sperber, eds.,
Experimental Pragmatics, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 25-49.
Cumming, Susanna & Tsuyoshi Ono. 1997. Discourse and
Grammar. In Teun A. van Dijk (ed.), Discourse as Structure
and Process, 112-137. London: Sage.
Du Bois, John W.; Susanna Cumming; Stephan SchuetzeCoburn; & Danae Paolino. 1993. Outline of discourse
transcription. In Jane A. Edwards and Martin D. Lampert
(eds.), Talking Data: Transcription and Coding in Discourse
Research, 45-89. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
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Resources and references
Hintz, Daniel J. 2006. Evidentiality and the co-construction of
knowledge in South Conchucos Quechua. Paper presented at
the 52nd International Congress of Americanists, Seville,
Spain.
Hintz, Daniel J. 2011. Crossing aspectual frontiers: Emergence,
evolution, and interwoven semantic domains in South
Conchucos Quechua discourse. UCPL 148, University of
California Press. Open access pdf:
http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520098855
Hintz, Diane M. 2007. Past tense forms and their functions in
South Conchucos Quechua: time, evidentiality, discourse
structure, and affect. Ph.D. dissertation. University of
California, Santa Barbara. Open access pdf:
http://repositories.cdlib.org/pacrim/Quechua/
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Resources and references
Hintz, Diane M. 2010. Transcribing conversational discourse.
Invited talk (90 minutes) presented at SIL Global Linguistics
Forum, Vajta, Hungary.
Payne, Thomas. 2009. Toward a balanced grammatical
description. Paper presented at the International Symposium
on Grammar Writing: Theoretical methodological and practical
issues, Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia
and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.
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