Fieldwork on epistemic authority markers: What we can learn from different types of data

2.1 Upper Napo Kichwa

Upper Napo Kichwa (ISO 639-3: quw)^[2] belongs to the QII subgroup of the Quechuan language family (Torero 1964). It is spoken by ca. 46,000 people (INEC 2010) in the Province of Napo, in the western region of the Ecuadorian Amazon adjacent to the Andes. Upper Napo Kichwa forms part of a dialect continuum of Amazonian Kichwa (Grzech et al. 2019).

Like other Quechuan languages, Upper Napo Kichwa is agglutinative and almost exclusively suffixing. Quechuan languages have been analysed as discourse-configurational (cf. Lefebvre and Muysken 1988; Muysken 1995), i.e. languages in which constituent order can be determined by factors related to information and discourse structure. However, the basic word order throughout the family is SOV. In Upper Napo Kichwa, SVO is also accepted by speakers, possibly due to extensive contact influence from Spanish. The two main word classes are nominals (encompassing adjectival modifiers) and verbs. While Ecuadorian Kichwa verbal morphology remains complex, it is significantly simpler than the verb-inflection morphology in Quechuan varieties spoken in Bolivia and Peru (cf. Adelaar and Muysken 2004: 187). For instance, there is only residual object marking on the verb whereas in Peruvian varieties both subject and object are indexed obligatorily.

2.2 Research questions

The methodology presented in this paper was designed for a research project with the goal of describing and analysing Upper Napo Kichwa epistemic markers (Grzech 2016a). The present paper aims to evaluate the chosen method, but for this to be possible, it is crucial to cite the research questions which the original project set out to answer. I summarise them in turn below, also outlining the steps taken to answer them.

The first research question was concerned with basic grammatical properties of Upper Napo Kichwa epistemic markers. The set of markers was identified on the basis of naturalistic data (see Section 2.3). This was coupled with elicitation to identify restriction in the markers' co-occurence with one another, as well as their distribution on the clause and discourse level.

Establishing the morphosyntactic properties of the markers paved the way for answering the second question, concerned with the semantics of the attested epistemic markers. At that stage of the research, the methodology described in this paper became especially relevant. My initial hypothesis related to the semantics of the markers was based on the studies of their cognates in other Quechua varieties (e.g. Faller 2002; Floyd 1997; Nuckolls 1993; Weber 1986), which suggested that the markers in question had evidential semantics. The elicitations employed to verify this assumption are discussed in more detail in Section 3, along with the tasks I used once I realised that the semantics of the markers goes beyond indicating the source of evidence.

The third research question concerned the information-structural properties of the markers. In other varieties, Quechuan evidential enclitics have been analysed as marking the information-structural categories of topic and focus. Therefore, it was important to establish whether and how the Upper Napo Kichwa markers contribute to information structure and the pragmatic structuring of clauses. Methods and tools employed to achieve this goal overlapped with the ones employed to describe the semantics of the markers (see Sections 4.2 and 4.3). A detailed discussion of the clitics’ information-structural functions beyond the scope of this paper and can be found elsewhere (Grzech 2016a: ch. 4). The same stimuli were used to answer a related research question that emerged at the later stage of the project, namely what factors, in addition to evidentiality and information structure, account for the markers’ distribution in discourse.

2.3 The corpus

The design of the corpus is one of the first methodological decisions documentary and descriptive linguists have to make (cf. e.g. Austin 2006). This applies to all aspects of language description, including research on epistemic marking. In order to make their results transparent, researchers should be clear about the data that these results are based on. Hence, this section provides a detailed discussion of the Upper Napo Kichwa corpus, explaining the choices related to the collection of the different kinds of data.

The corpus in question was a result of collaborative fieldwork funded by ELDP (Endangered Languages Documentation Programme, Grant id: IGS0166). It was collected during two trips in 2013 and 2014, amounting to 10 months of fieldwork, during which I lived in the speaker community in the province of Napo, Ecuador. As mentioned above, the documentation of Upper Napo Kichwa was a collaborative project. Several native-speaker researchers were involved in all of its stages, from data collection to transcription and translation (see Acknowledgements). The objective behind the creation of the corpus was to make it useful for research on epistemic marking, as well as valuable and interesting for the speakers of Upper Napo Kichwa. To meet these different needs, the corpus was divided into three parts: naturalistic discourse, staged communicative events and elicitation. The first two parts were recorded on audio and video, while for elicitation only audio recordings were made. Table 1 provides a summary of the corpus, showing which kinds of data were collected during which fieldwork period. During the first fieldtrip, I focused on grammatical elicitation and naturalistic discourse. The second fieldtrip involved testing hypotheses regarding epistemic enclitics through elicitation and experiments.

These recordings were transcribed and translated into Spanish by native-speaker researchers in ELAN and revised twice to ensure the accuracy of transcription and translation. The materials were segmented by native speakers without linguistic training, so ‘turns’ as used in Table 1 roughly correspond to intonation units; they only loosely correlate with the notion of ‘turn’ as used in linguistic research.

The naturalistic discourse part of the corpus was designed jointly with the other members of the research team, who are native speakers of Upper Napo Kichwa. Its purpose was to document discourse practices of the speech community as well as culturally important topics and customs. The naturalistic discourse corpus is a crucially important and indispensable part of an epistemic research toolkit (cf. Grzech 2020c; Mithun 2020). Naturalistic data allow an insight into how epistemic marking is used in real-life situations and provide the background for hypotheses regarding the functions of epistemic marking (see Section 5). As stated by Kittilä et al. (2018: 285), “[d]ata that represent authentic language use in real situations are necessary for arriving at a complete picture of the use of evidentials in any given language (…).” This observation could be extended to all kinds of epistemic expressions.

To construct this part of the corpus, the native-speaker members of the research team suggested topics that were interesting from the point of view of linguistic and cultural documentation. They approached community members who were experts on a given topic and asked them to participate in interviews or demonstrations. The native-speaker researchers also acted as interviewers and facilitators, which was crucial for the naturalistic quality of the recorded data and its high value for epistemic research. This part of the corpus includes interviews, life-stories, traditional narratives, two-party and multi-party conversations, monologues, ceremonial speeches, community events, political discourse and songs. This is important from the methodological point of view: given the connections epistemic expressions have with pragmatic and intersubjective aspects of language, their use is prone to vary between different discourse genres (cf. Kittilä et al. 2018: 282).

The staged communicative events (cf. Himmelmann 1998: 185–186) part of the corpus includes discourse resulting from presenting consultants with video and picture stimuli and asking them to perform specific tasks. The stimuli, which I discuss in more detail in Section 4.2, include e.g. the Pear Story video (Chafe 1980) and tasks for two consultants from the Questionnaire on Information Structure (Skopeteas et al. 2006), which could be classified as interactive tasks related to narrative production and problem solving (cf. Grzech 2020c). These types of tasks allow for comparing constructions used by various speakers in the same context and for controlling what information is shared between participants. This part of the corpus was recorded with six speakers, transcribed and translated in ELAN by native speakers, parsed and glossed in Toolbox and re-exported to ELAN for search purposes.

The elicitation corpus contains data from one-to-one elicitation sessions. In these sessions speakers were asked to translate sentences from Spanish to Upper Napo Kichwa, to come up with utterances fitting a given context, and to judge grammaticality or felicity of utterances (cf. Matthewson 2004: 381). The one-to-one elicitation sessions also included requests for translations or reactions, with rich situational context provided, so as to elicit evidential meanings (see Section 4.2). The one-to-one elicitation sessions also included single consultant tasks from the Questionnaire on Information Structure (Skopeteas et al. 2006). Recorded sessions were conducted with three speakers, but I occasionally asked other speakers for judgements regarding utterances or tried them out in my own speech to check how they would be received.

The recorded corpus was also supplemented with ubiquitous participant observation during the 10 months spent in the speaker community. Many ideas, hypotheses and observations were made possible by observing naturalistic language use and trying out certain constructions in interaction to check if they would be judged appropriate by native speakers.

4.1 Elicitation

Elicitation is understood here as tasks which do not involve interaction between native speakers, are based on textual cues, and do not involve any additional stimuli. In the context of the Upper Napo Kichwa project, a typical elicitation task involved the researcher and one consultant. The consultant was asked to provide grammaticality or felicity judgements, to translate sentences from Spanish to Upper Napo Kichwa, or to provide an appropriate utterance in Upper Napo Kichwa in the context described by the researcher.

As discussed above, my initial working hypothesis was that Upper Napo Kichwa had evidential markers. This led to elicitation of a range of sentences related to different ways of acquiring information, e.g. asking consultants how the same proposition would be uttered if they learnt about it through direct observation, touch, hearing, inference, or hearsay from a trustworthy or untrustworthy source. Since the enclitics did not always surface in the contexts in which they were assumed to be possible, I introduced a reverse scenario. Consultants were provided with an utterance with one of the assumed evidentials, =mi (direct) and =cha (inferential/conjectural) and then asked whether it would be appropriate in a particular evidential context. The less constrained tasks, in which the consultants were given more freedom to think about the context of the utterance or the utterance itself, generally delivered results that turned out to be more in line with naturalistic language use.

Another concern in the investigation of the targeted clitics, was the type of semantic contribution they make in an utterance, i.e. whether their meaning is propositional or illocutionary (cf. e.g. Faller 2014). The need for establishing this was grounded in the debate regarding the semantic nature of evidentials and epistemic modals (see e.g. Matthewson et al. 2007). The distinction is seen – at least by scholars using formal semantic approaches – as a pre-requisite for a thorough description of evidential markers. Tests targeting the level of meaning, devised specifically for evidential research, were proposed e.g. by Peterson (2010: § 3.5) and include (i) the known truth/falsity test, (ii) the challengeability test,^[5] (iii) the interrogative scope test and (iv) the embeddability test. The first two aim to determine whether an expression under study is truth-conditional, and the latter two allow conclusions on whether it can be analysed as having an illocutionary meaning (cf. Peterson 2010). I decided to apply the tests in my own research, following their application in other studies of evidential systems in lesser spoken languages (Faller 2002; Peterson 2010). This decision was also guided by the erstwhile consensus in the literature that the meaning encoded by epistemic marking could be either evidential or epistemic modal (Boye 2012), and by the assumption that the Upper Napo Kichwa evidentials are semantically similar to those in Cuzco Quechua (cf. Faller 2002). The first three of the above tests could only be conducted in the elicitation setting since they require asking speakers for grammaticality judgements. The embeddability test was conducted on the basis of stimuli-based data (but cf. Grzech 2016a: 344–345), but I discuss some of its results below jointly with the results of the interrogative scope test.

The assumption underlying the known truth/falsity test is that epistemic modals are not felicitous when the speaker knows the truth value of the proposition since they are used to quantify over epistemically accessible possible words (cf. Faller 2002; Matthewson 2011: 335). As Peterson (2010: 110) puts it: “if the use of the evidential is felicitous when the speaker knows the prejacent is true or false, the evidential cannot be a modal.” Thus, if the consultant is presented with a statement which they know is true/false, they should judge it infelicitous with an epistemic modal. This test was applied to verify whether the Upper Napo Kichwa =mi could be analysed as such. The results of the elicitation have shown that, like its cognate in Cuzco Quechua, the Upper Napo Kichwa =mi does not weaken the assertion but rather makes it stronger/more emphatic (Faller 2002: 155). In Upper Napo Kichwa =mi-marked statements are felicitous when the speaker knows that the proposition expressed is a fact, as shown in (2), (4) or (5) above or (10) below. Therefore, on the basis of elicitation it was possible to establish that =mi behaves unlike an epistemic modal. In relation to the possible modal analysis, targeted by the truth/falsity test, Faller (2002: ch. 4) also looks into whether the Cuzco Quechua =mi can be analysed as an expression of certainty. She rejects this analysis on the grounds that the Cuzco Quechua =mi “regularly occurs in content questions” (Faller 2002: 154), and that it thus does not make much sense to analyse it as expressing a high degree of certainty. In Upper Napo Kichwa =mi also occurs in interrogatives, as shown in examples (6) and (7) in Section 3. Thus, also in Upper Napo Kichwa, the analysis of =mi as a marker of certainty does not hold up.^[6]

The second test, used to determine whether a given expression has truth-conditional meaning, is the challengeability test. It relies on the assumption that if an expression affects the truth conditions of the utterance, it can also be challenged: questioned, doubted, rejected or disagreed with. Non-truth-conditional expressions, on the other hand, do not specify how the world should be for the utterance to be true and thus are non-challengeable. The test involves eliciting possible responses to an epistemically marked statement to verify whether it is possible to challenge the marker under study, in this case, =mi. The execution of this test was more problematic than that of the known truth/falsity tests as illustrated with (10) and the ensuing discussion.

How can =mi in (10) be challenged? If, in line with the project’s initial hypothesis, we assumed that the marker encodes direct evidence, negating it would require a statement such as “That’s not true. You didn’t see it” (Faller 2002: 158). However, if the meaning we are trying to target is the speaker’s ‘right to know’, the challenging utterance should look like (11).

In response to (10), (11) was indeed judged infelicitous. However, a question arises whether such a judgement constitutes sufficient evidence for reaching a conclusion about the semantic contribution of =mi to the clause. The utterance of (11) could be judged infelicitous for a variety of reasons independently of the contribution of =mi to the assertion in (10). For instance, it could be rejected due to norms related to politeness, but reliably identifying our consultants’ motivations for rejecting a given utterance is extremely difficult. Consequently, the results of elicitation such as the one discussed above should not be treated as definitive but rather as indicative of certain properties of the expression under study – in this case, non-truth conditionality.

The remaining two tests are the interrogative scope test and the embeddability test. As mentioned above, they are meant to determine whether a meaning of an evidential expression is propositional or illocutionary, given that each of these analyses makes “different predictions regarding embeddability and scope” of evidentials (Peterson 2010: 117). As I show in the discussion below, the results of applying these tests to the Upper Napo Kichwa epistemic markers, illustrated here with =mi, were not clear-cut.

The interrogative scope test is based on the premise that pragmatic operators (illocutionary evidentials) are assumed to scope over propositional operators (modal evidentials, Peterson 2010: 120). It follows that “epistemic modals cannot take scope over an illocutionary act, such as performing a request/asking a question” (Peterson 2010: 121). If the expression under study is a pragmatic operator, it should then scope over a speech act, which would mean that it could be used e.g. to perform that speech act on somebody else’s behalf. Faller (2002: 233) applies this test to the reportative evidential -si in Cuzco Quechua and proves that it can, in fact, be used in that way, as shown in (12):

Faller (2002: 233) explains that (12) was uttered by one of the consultants to repeat the original question she (Faller) asked someone else: imaynata kashanki? (‘how are you?’). Since the addressee didn’t hear Faller’s question, the consultant repeated it, adding the reportative marker. The resulting answer of the original addressee was given directly to Faller, and not to the speaker who uttered (12).

My attempts to find out if in Upper Napo Kichwa the epistemic markers also could scope over speech acts proved to be more challenging. A key to successful elicitation is to make sure that both the analyst and the consultant have the same context in mind (cf. Bochnak and Matthewson 2020). When I tried to explain to consultants that I would like them to make a statement/give an order/ask a question on somebody else’s behalf, the sentences they volunteered were usually marked with the reportative construction =mi ni- (=mi say-), where ni- can be analysed as part of the reportative construction, rather than as the main verb in the embedding clause. This is shown in (13), where the main verb is another verb of speech, rima- ‘talk’.

This construction, despite containing =mi, also makes explicit reference to the original speaker, framing the utterance as theirs by means of an inflected verb of speech. The data suggest that this way of reporting is not limited to declaratives. I found the relevant context very hard to elicit, but utterances supporting this claim are attested elsewhere in the corpus.

The Upper Napo Kichwa example in (14) occurred in a situation analogous to the one related to the Cuzco Quechua example (12). In the case of (14), I was at consultants’ house to record them narrating the Pear Story. When we were about to begin the second iteration of the task, one of the consultants did not notice that I said he should start. The other consultant then uttered (14):

The conversation prior to (14) was not recorded, so my original utterance cannot be recovered. Most likely, it was an illocutionary act of requesting, prompting the speakers to start. In this report, unlike in (12), I was explicitly signalled as the original speaker, and the utterance was a report rather than a speech act of requesting performed on my behalf. The above suggests that while =mi is used to report utterances of others or utterances from previous discourse, it cannot be used to perform a speech act on someone’s behalf since the original speaker is indexed by the inflected verb of speech.

The discussion above is also linked to the final of the four tests mentioned above, namely the one related to embeddability. Peterson formulates it as follows: “an illocutionary operator cannot be understood as part of the propositional content of an embedded clause, but a modal can” (Peterson 2010: 118). From the discussion above regarding the impossibility of challenging the meaning encoded by =mi, it follows that the marker is not part of the negated proposition, which would point to it being illocutionary. On the other hand, attempts of embedding =mi in conditional antecedents deliver mixed results, which should be explored in detail in further research.

Peterson distinguishes between syntactic and semantic embedding, which do not mutually entail one another. Syntactic embedding entails that the element occurs in a clause other than the root clause while semantic embedding means that it is interpreted as being in the scope of some other operator (cf. Schenner 2010, cited in Peterson 2010: 118). Examples (13) and (14) show that =mi can be syntactically embedded under verbs of speech, and the corpus delivers similar examples for verbs of thinking (cf. Grzech 2016a: §5.3.3.4). Can =mi in these utterances also be analysed as semantically embedded? First of all, note that in (13) =mi occurs both in the embedded speech complement and in the matrix clause, which suggests that each of the two occurrences targets the epistemic authority of a different speaker. An analogous case obtains in (14). In that example =mi seems to target the reported speaker (myself). At the same time =mari, which indicates a speaker-addressee imbalance in epistemic authority (cf. Grzech in preparation), targets the speaker who uttered (14) and our mutual addressee. While this analysis emerges from the use of the markers and the translations, I found targeting it in elicitation and obtaining negative evidence extremely challenging. Epistemic authority is an elusive concept, which can arise due to a variety of factors, and appropriately targeting the relevant contrasts in elicitation seemed unattainable, at least at the relatively early stage of the research described in this paper.

Another issue that arises in relation to elicitation is how much it can tell us about the meaning of the markers under study. The scope test, as well as the one related to embedding, was originally aimed at establishing whether a marker can be analysed as an illocutionary modifier. As mentioned above, embeddability and scoping under speech acts were seen as proving the non-illocutionary nature of the markers (cf. Peterson 2010). More recently, it has been argued that discourse particles interact both with clause type and illocutionary force – they can be restricted to certain clause types and at the same time contribute to the illocutionary force of utterances by modifying the speaker’s communicative intention (Coniglio and Zegrean 2012: 230). The relationship between illocutionary meaning and embedding has been discussed in more detail (cf. Krifka 2014; Woods 2016). These findings put the usefulness of the tests discussed above into question or, at least, suggest that their results should be treated with caution and not regarded as definite proof of any of the marker’s properties. Throughout this paper, I argue that similar caution should be extended towards all the elicitation-based results concerning epistemic markers. The extreme context-sensitivity of such markers does not lend itself well to the elicitation setting, and their complex meanings are often extremely hard to capture adequately in setting up contexts for eliciting translations and judgements. In the following section, I discuss other methods of obtaining data from which a more accurate picture of the usage of epistemic marking may emerge.

4.2 Non-interactive stimuli

The tasks I discuss here are, unlike elicitation, based on stimuli. Their aim is to prompt speakers to produce either coherent stretches of text or individual sentences which are nonetheless connected with one another. By referring to non-interactive stimuli, I mean that they are not meant for eliciting interactive discourse. Rather, they are stimuli meant for work with one consultant per session. In the context of this project, stimuli for individual consultants were first introduced to determine the information-structural contribution of the different markers to the clause. The data obtained this way have, however, also proven useful beyond their original research purpose.

As mentioned in Section 1, Quechuan evidential markers are also analysed as markers of focus (Muysken 1995; Sánchez 2010, 2015). For this reason, I considered it necessary to study this aspect of their use together with their epistemic meaning. At first glance, epistemic meaning and the information-structural contribution of the markers might seem unrelated. However, both are context sensitive phenomena, which is why establishing the communicative context appropriate for a given utterance is extremely important (cf. Matthewson 2004: 395). While naturalistic discourse is an obvious source of context-bound utterances, using it as the sole source of data raises the same kind of issues in the case of information-structure research as in the case of epistemic fieldwork. While relational notions such as topic or focus may be constrained or influenced by the discourse context, they are not uniquely determined by it (Gundel and Fretheim 2004: 177). Much like epistemic marking, they can be influenced by the speaker’s interests, perspective or previous experience, among other factors. Whether or not to present information as focal/topical is a decision depending on the subjective perspective a speaker chooses to adopt. Consequently, studying the linguistic context of an utterance without an insight into the speaker’s motivations and mental states will only deliver partial results regarding the possible topic-focus articulations. I come back to this issue in Section 5, where I discuss the involvement of consultants in the transcription of the data as one of the ways to mitigate this issue. The argument developed in the above paragraph is not meant to discourage fieldworkers from collecting naturalistic data. Rather, it aims to point out that supplementing naturalistic corpus data with more structured data sources can deliver more complete results.

Given this possible indeterminacy of information-structural categories, it is important to be able to elicit texts where the content and development of common ground, as well as the intentions of the interlocutors, can be monitored more easily. Skopeteas et al. (2006) developed a set of stimuli designed specifically for research on information structure; these were adapted to fieldwork on Upper Napo Kichwa. The experimental part of the toolkit (QUIS, Skopeteas et al. 2006) consists of 29 tasks, aiming to elicit different aspects of information structure. It is accompanied by a manual describing the goals of each task and the procedure of using each stimulus. The tasks are divided into four sessions for a single consultant, which I discuss below, and four sessions for two consultants (see Section 4.3). The tasks are repeated several times over the sessions, which ensures intra-speaker reproducibility of results (Bochnak and Matthewson 2015: 5; cf. Section 5), thus increasing the reliability of the obtained data. In my fieldwork on Upper Napo Kichwa, the QUIS tasks were carried out with two consultants, a male and a female, aged 28 and 18, respectively. They were both native speakers of Upper Napo Kichwa and bilingual in Spanish. Four individual sessions were carried out with each consultant, and they both participated in four two-participant sessions. The collected material amounted to nearly 5.5 h of data, comprising 919 utterances, transcribed and tagged for the presence of discourse enclitics. Given that the sessions were only conducted with two consultants, their results were not robust and hence were treated as indicative of certain properties of the epistemic markers rather than as conclusive.

In both kinds of sessions (individual and for two consultants), the tasks were randomised and repeated in different orders. I selected 18 of the 29 tasks on the basis of two factors. Firstly, the chosen tasks were aimed at investigating the distinction between given and new information, focus, contrast, and topicality. Secondly, I decided not to use the tasks which required familiarity with complex interpretative conventions (cf. Section 5). For most of the picture-based tasks, the original stimuli were adapted to the fieldwork context; the characters, objects and activities were re-drawn to better depict the Amazonian reality (see Figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1:

Original stimulus for QUIS Task 18 (Who does what).

Figure 2:

Adapted stimulus for QUIS Task 18 (Who does what).

Although the adaptation brought about positive results, such as the consultants’ heightened interest in the pictures and ease of interpretation, the process was not without its pitfalls, which I discuss in more detail in Section 5.

The sessions for individual consultants were mostly aimed at eliciting utterances with different information-structural configurations, triggering topical constructions and different types of foci. Interestingly, the stimuli delivered mostly tokens of =ga, the marker of topicality/given information (Grzech 2016b), which occurred here with much higher frequency than in the other parts of the corpus. This was not the case for the epistemic enclitics, which were used sporadically in the sessions for individual consultants. Rather than rendering the data invalid, this points to one of the characteristics of the epistemic enclitics, namely to their tendency to occur in high-stake interactions (cf. e.g. Schultze-Berndt 2017: 198; Grzech 2020c). In contexts which the speakers judge as not communicatively real or engaging, they are not likely to use epistemic clitics.

An example of a task for one consultant that did not succeed in eliciting epistemic markers despite the fact that it was aimed at eliciting the topic-focus distinction was Task 18 from the QUIS stimuli set (Skopeteas et al. 2006), Who does what. An example of one of the pictures used in this task is shown in Figure 2 above. In the different iterations of the task, the consultants were shown one of the two pictures, and asked questions aimed at eliciting different topic-focus articulations, distributed across eight conditions. These conditions, and the corresponding questions (relevant for Figure 2), are shown in Table 3. The two images from Figure 2 were used separately. The conditions related to parallel events refer to the image showing two people, and those relating to a single event refer to the image of just one person.

The questions in Table 3 were translated into Upper Napo Kichwa beforehand with the help of native-speaker consultants to ensure that they were accurate and natural. Despite that, this task, as well as other similar tasks from the QUIS manual, was not successful in the elicitation of epistemic enclitics. As mentioned above, the only enclitic ubiquitous in the elicitations based on the QUIS manual was the marker =ga, related to topicality (e.g. in response to the question in condition B from Table 3; cf. Grzech 2016b for a more detailed discussion).

Another method used in single-consultant sessions were sequences of pictures forming a story – a simpler version of storyboards (cf. Bochnak and Matthewson 2020; Gawne 2020; Knuchel 2020). They proved much more successful in emulating a naturalistic way of speaking. The stimuli set included two picture sequences, one of them shown in Figure 3 below. The consultants were asked to narrate both stories three times: from the point of view of the youngest child, the parent and an external narrator. These different iterations of the narrative were recorded on separate occasions. Responses consisted of longer stretches of text, including fictional dialogues between the characters, as shown in (15):

Figure 3:

Tomato story from the QUIS set (Task 19).

The consultants’ responses to this task gave a more realistic view of how language is used, and they included epistemic clitics. At the same time, the context of the clitics’ use was relatively straightforward. This enabled tracking the knowledge states of the three types of narrators making the resulting texts accessible to analysis. The consultants seemed to feel relatively at ease while performing the task in comparison to the elicitation sessions and the simpler picture-based stimuli, with which they sometimes visibly failed to engage. Although this stimulus was not adapted to the local context, the stories were simple and relatable, based around easily identifiable relationships between family members.

The positive outcomes of using of these simple storyboards confirm the positive appraisal of storyboards in the existing literature and in other papers in the present volume (Gawne, Gipper, Knuchel). Matthewson (2018) advocates using storyboards for research on discourse markers. Bochnak and Matthewson (2020: 261) point out their usefulness for working on “phenomena which rely on controlling for interlocutor beliefs”, and the SCOPIC project uses storyboards for collecting parallax corpora used for analysing expressions of social cognition (Barth and Evans 2017; Bergqvist 2020; Knuchel 2020).

4.3 Interactive stimuli

The last type of stimuli used within the Upper Napo Kichwa project were what Lüpke (2009) calls ‘interactive stimuli’, aimed at generating interactions between participants. This was the most heterogeneous group of stimuli, including pictures and videos serving as bases for constructing narratives, generating dialogues, solving problems or performing joint tasks (ordering pictures into the right sequence, finding a way on a map). Just like the non-interactive stimuli, the interactive stimuli – with the exception of one video, which I discuss below – were not designed specifically for work on epistemic marking. Rather, they were chosen for their capacity for generating interactive discourse while also allowing for tracking participants’ knowledge states and epistemic rights. Some of the stimuli – e.g. the videos for eliciting reciprocal constructions (Evans et al. 2004) – were included in the epistemic investigation post-hoc, after it turned out that the interactions they generated were better suited for epistemic research than for the purpose they were originally designed for. This part of the corpus included map tasks and picture ordering tasks, which are discussed thoroughly in other contributions to this volume (Knuchel) and which turned out to be less effective in generating “disputes about factual knowledge” (Mushin 2013: 639) than the stimuli more related to the consultants’ real life experience. Given their limited success in eliciting reasonably naturalistic interaction in the context of my fieldwork, the map tasks and picture ordering tasks (Tasks 20 and 8 from the QUIS set, respectively) are not discussed here in more detail.

Instead, I focus on the video stimuli which did succeed in generating a more engaging conversation. The tasks with the most coverage were the re-tellings of the Pear Story videos (Chafe 1980), carried out with four pairs of speakers. One member of the speaker pair watched the video first, without the other one being present, and then narrated it to the researcher. Subsequently, the second speaker was invited, and they then watched the video together, discussing it amongst themselves. This way of administering the task created an epistemic imbalance and restricted the common ground to the events in the video. Example (16) demonstrates why such a constraint on shared knowledge is analytically useful:

It was uttered when two speakers were discussing a scene in which the main character accidently runs his bicycle into a stone in the middle of the road. The speaker, who was watching the film for the first time, conjectured that it was the three boys, shown before in the video, who placed the stone on the road. As mentioned in Section 3, the position of the clitic is associated with the focus of the clause – in this case the 3PL pronoun – while the epistemic meaning of the clitic scopes over the entire clause (cf. Muysken 1995). If this statement was uttered in a real-life situation, it would be impossible to know whether the boys discussed are known for playing pranks or have done something similar in the past, which would create a different evidential base for the use of =mi. In this case, since the speaker can only base the utterance on the events in the film, we can conclude that the statement is based on a conjecture. This, in turn, allows us to call the direct evidential analysis of =mi into question.

Other interactions based on video stimuli also support the argument for re-analysing the Upper Napo Kichwa evidentials in broader epistemic terms. The only stimulus which was custom-made for the project was created on the basis of a YouTube video of a magician performing six instances of the ‘three shell’ game, in which the audience has to decide under which of three cups a ball ends up. I edited the video, separating each iteration of the game, and creating two clips for each game – one where the video stopped just before the final location of the ball was revealed, and another of the complete trick revealing the ball’s location. I ran the task with two consultants relatively early on in the project when it was still unclear if the evidential analysis of the clitics was correct. I asked the participants to comment on the ball’s location after watching the cut clip. I expected them to mark their guesses about the ball’s locations with =cha, the cognate of inferential/conjectural evidentials in other Quechuan languages. However, in the 10-min interaction =cha did not surface at all. Instead, the speakers frequently marked their conjectures with =mi, even after repeatedly having made the wrong guesses:

This use of =mi in guesswork, where the inferential =cha would be expected, was another suggestion that the analysis of Upper Napo Kichwa epistemic enclitics required considering semantic factors beyond evidentiality. The use of =mi in guesses was not predicted by its analysis as a direct evidential or a marker of the best possible ground (Faller 2002) but it could be accounted for as an attempt to exercise the ‘primary right’ to assess the situation (Heritage and Raymond 2005; Stivers et al. 2011a) even in the absence of a factual claim to knowledge.

Both targeted elicitation (see Section 4.1) and the above stimulus specifically designed to elicit instances of =cha failed to trigger the use of the marker. Unexpectedly, =cha did surface in response to a stimulus meant for another purpose altogether: the Reciprocal Constructions and Situation Type videos (Evans et al. 2004). These recordings feature reciprocal actions such as hugging, de-lousing, kissing or shaking hands. The events were staged by students, and it is evident in the films that even the actors themselves treated the tasks they performed as a game, rather than as a realistic enactment. The authors assumed that viewers would be able to treat the recorded content as an abstraction from the real-life situations they experienced. In the Upper Napo Kichwa project this assumption failed completely. The stimuli proved useful for eliciting several reasonably spontaneous exchanges, but their aim was trying to guess what the actors were doing and why. This is illustrated in (16) with a statement prompted by the actors hugging and subsequently doing a ‘high five’, which is not a well-known gesture in rural Ecuador:

The example shows that the video unintentionally served as a good ground for discussing assumptions and factual knowledge thus allowing an insight into how =cha is used in discourse. In the context of elicitation, when I presented speakers with =cha-marked utterances without a surrounding discourse context, they were always interpreted as interrogatives. This is shown in (19).

The fact that (19a) was interpreted as infelicitous suggested that =cha cannot be analysed in terms similar to its cognate in e.g. Cuzco Quechua, where the equivalent of (19a) would have been felicitous (cf. Faller 2002: 3). This interpretation seemed to have been confirmed by the fact that the marker did not occur in contexts where conjecture would have been expected, like in the three shell game video described above, and that Upper Napo Kichwa speakers frequently marked conjectural claims with the construction =mi yachin (=mi seem-3) rather than with =cha. Against the backdrop of these observations, it was the example in (18) that gave me an insight into how the marker was used in natural language to express lack of knowledge/authority, independently of the mode of access to the event described by the speaker. The reciprocal videos were an instance of opportunistic data collection, which was not included in the original research design but did contribute meaningful data for the study of the epistemic marking system.

The interpretation of the marker based on example (18) was later confirmed in a discussion that followed another interactive stimulus, the Pear Story video.

In (20), the speaker narrates the video at the same time as she is watching it for the first time. She first interprets the pears as coconuts, but then immediately (while the pear tree is still on the screen) corrects her own assumption and makes a =cha-marked query, which is based on direct, visual evidence. These and similar examples led me to analyse =cha as a marker disclaiming epistemic authority rather than a conjectural evidential (cf. Grzech 2020c for more details of this analysis).

The last example of an interactive stimulus is also the one that has proven the most successful in emulating naturalistic interaction in which participants have real stakes. It was the Stolen Watch video series from the QUIS set (Tell a story task, Skopeteas et al. 2006). The videos tell a story of theft, but each of them casts a different character as the thief – a young man in one, and a young woman in the other. First, I showed a different video to each of the two consultants. Subsequently, I asked them to imagine they have both been accused of stealing the watch and have to accuse the other in order to defend themselves. This generated a lively discussion, with the use of epistemic clitics similar to that in everyday discourse, as shown in (21) and (22).

The use of =mi in (21) showcases the point made in Section 4.1, i.e. that utterances containing the enclitic can be more forceful and argumentative than epistemically unmarked utterances.

In elicitation, speakers often find statements with =mi on second-person pronouns or predicates problematic and inappropriate. The disagreement shown in (22) contributes evidence that such a use is possible and felicitous in certain contexts.

The use of =mi in this enacted conversation allows an insight into how epistemic marking might be used in conflict, without the potential problem associated with recording this type of high-stake interactions in real life.