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Article published In:
Studies in Language
Vol. 45:2 (2021) ► pp.277–320

Markers of epistemic modality and their origins

Evidence from two unrelated sign languages

ORCID logo | University of Copenhagen

Native deaf signers express epistemic modality by different means: mental-state words, clause-internal particles, signs indicating hypothesis, and nonmanually. The data for this study come from two unrelated sign languages, Danish Sign Language and Japanese Sign Language. In dialogues the signers use both calques of majority-language words and signs that appear to have emerged in the sign languages only. Based on the multifunctionality of some word forms, the origin of the epistemic modal particles may be traced back to tags, interjections, and lexical signs, a route motivated by interaction and also found in unrelated spoken languages. Furthermore, in both sign languages, the first-person pronoun can be used, without a verb, as an epistemic “anchor” of a proposition, a construction that seems specific to languages in the gestural-visual modality. Another modality-specific feature is the possibility of transferring the expression of a marker of epistemic uncertainty from one articulator to another.

Keywords: sign language, epistemic modality, cognitive motivation, functional motivation, gestural-visual modality
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Epistemic modality
  • 3.Epistemic modality in sign languages
  • 4.The two sign languages and the data
  • 5.How to understand the sign language examples of this study
  • 6.Expressions of epistemic modality in the data
    • 6.1Signs about mental states and activities
    • 6.2Multifunctional particles in the data
    • 6.3Calques of markers of epistemic modality in the majority languages
    • 6.4Nonmanual markers of speaker uncertainty in DTS
  • 7.Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 7 September 2020
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https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.19065.eng
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