UC Berkeley

This dissertation concerns the expression of epistemic modality across syntactic categories in Kipsigis, an understudied Kalenjin language of Western Kenya. In addition to describing a range of morphosyntactic and semantic properties of Kipsigis, this dissertation takes as its empirical focus two case studies of epistemic modality in the nominal and verbal domains. Through these case studies, this dissertation contributes to the integration of data from understudied languages into semantic theory and suggests that the derivation of epistemic modal content—both across languages and across syntactic domains—must be achieved in a range of different ways.

In the nominal domain, I describe and analyze Kipsigis epistemic indefinites, highlighting the ways in which these forms pose challenges for existing analyses of epistemic indefinites across languages. In particular, I show that Kipsigis epistemic indefinites can signal both first order and higher order ignorance but do not take obligatory wide scope, which challenges the correlation between ignorance type and scope in Dawson (2020). To capture the Kipsigis pattern, I propose that the ignorance effects triggered by use of an epistemic indefinite in Kipsigis arise pragmatically due to competition with another type of Kipsigis nominal, which signals speaker knowledge about the noun’s referent (following work on Russian to and koe indefinites by Geist & Onea 2007).

In the verbal domain, I consider biased belief reports with the Kipsigis verb pɑr ‘think’, which can be used in two very different contexts: 1) to suggest that the reported belief is false or unlikely, and 2) to remind the addressee that the reported belief is true. While these negative bias and reminding functions are independently attested in other languages, the Kipsigis pattern is unique in that it combines these two functions in a single lexical item. To account for this behavior, I propose that, in addition to its basic belief semantics, pɑr contributes an instruction for Common Ground management (Krifka 2008): the reported belief must not be added to the Common Ground.