The grammar of knowledge in Tima

Abstract

Tima is an endangered Niger-Congo language spoken in the linguistically heterogeneous Nuba Mountains in Central Sudan. As is common in languages in the area, it has formal means of expressing firsthand visual evidence on the part of the speaker when reporting on events. In Tima, this egocentric perspective is expressed on the verb, through ventive marking, as well as on prepositional phrases. Although ventive marking as such is widespread in a range of African language families, its link with evidentiality marking appears to have gone unnoticed in the literature so far. A second strategy, again common in a range of other Niger-Congo languages as well as neighbouring Nilo-Saharan and Afroasiatic languages, involves logophoric marking. Through this strategy, speakers distance themselves from the discourse they are reproducing, and signal the intrusion of another person’s voice in their own words. The third and final strategy discussed here, again part of the grammar of knowledge, is the use of ideophonic adverbs in combination with perception verbs as an interpersonal strategy for the depiction of experiential knowledge.