Managing Common Ground with epistemic marking: ‘Evidential’ markers in Upper Napo Kichwa and their functions in interaction

Abstract

This article proposes that ‘evidential’ markers in Upper Napo Kichwa (Quechuan, Ecuador) are not in fact evidential, but mark epistemic distinctions related to ownership and distribution of knowledge in discourse. To demonstrate this, I analyse two Upper Napo Kichwa epistemic enclitics, =mi and =tá. I account for their distribution in the corpus, analysing the occurrences of the markers in situated language use. To provide a functional explanation for how the markers are used, I discuss the notion of ‘epistemic Common Ground management’. I postulate that it is relevant to how epistemic discourse strategies and marking systems are used in a variety of languages. Subsequently, I illustrate this claim with a case study, showing how ‘epistemic Common Ground management’ allows to account for the distribution of the Upper Napo Kichwa epistemic markers. Finally, I propose that looking at the formally divergent strategies from a common functional perspective enhances our understanding of how epistemic marking is used cross-linguistically.