When people communicate, they not only exchange information, but they also indicate how the speaker’s and addressee’s knowledge relate to that information. What is the source of the information, how certain is the speaker of it, is it unexpected for the speaker or addressee? Interestingly, the linguistic strategies to express these aspects are typically multifunctional, indicating fuzzy boundaries between the concepts of source, certainty etc. For example, saying ‘They DID eat it’ can indicate a contrast with the addressee thinking they didn’t, but also that this is surprising, and that the speaker is certain. All the concepts related to the speaker’s and addressee’s knowledge are thus interconnected in our mind: together they form one conceptual space. How is that space organised? And is it the same for speakers of all languages? While previous analyses unfruitfully focus on rigid categories (such as ‘contrast’ and ‘evidentiality’), the current project takes advantage of the fuzzy boundaries to create a network map of this intersubjective epistemicity. We will investigate a number of African languages, which have not had a chance to contribute to this area, in collaboration with native speaker linguists, and making use of virtual reality stimuli. For these languages, we study how they express the detailed aspects of the speaker’s and addressee’s knowledge in relation to the information. Given that concepts that are expressed together must be more closely related than those that are not, the resulting data can be used for a proximity network analysis. This then forms a map that shows how the human mind organises this conceptual space, and by comparing crosslinguistically, we can discover to what extent our conceptual organisation is the same or influenced by the language(s) we speak.

• africa

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