EVENT: UWA Linguistics Seminar

In this talk I consider how the recent ‘epistemic turn’ in Conversation Analysis (e.g. Heritage 2012) is deepening our understanding of the ways in which language is utilised as a resource for knowledge management, and the utility of knowledge management for achieving broader social goals. This in turn is leading us to consider lexicalised and grammaticalised expressions of knowledge more robustly in terms of their social embeddedness. Drawing on a range of data from different languages, I show how some of the classic issues in the study the ‘linguistic coding of epistemology’ (Chafe & Nichols 1986), such as the typology of evidential categories, and the relationships between evidentiality and epistemic modality may be recast through the lens of knowledge management as a key driver of social interaction.

Chafe, Wallace & Johanna Nichols (eds) 1986. Evidentiality: The linguistic coding of epistemology. New York: Academic Press Heritage, John 2012. The epistemic engine: Action formation, sequence organisation and territories of knowledge. Research on Language and Social Interaction 45: 30-52. Short bio Associate Professor Ilana Mushin is a Reader in Linguistics at the University of Queensland. She has longstanding research interests in relationships between language, culture, cognition and social interaction. She has been researching the pragmatics of evidential strategies since the 1990s and is the author of Evidentiality and Epistemological Stance, published by John Benjamins in 2001. Her recent research includes knowledge management in conversation and in primary school classroom interaction, and descriptive and interactional linguistic analysis of Australian First Nations languages, especially Garrwa.

Zoom Session Details: Link: https://uwa.zoom.us/j/96327923565?pwd=a3l3SFU5ZDlsWXdEdTFPL0o1eU9UUT09 Password: 400831