Belief, Evidence, and Interactional Meaning in Urama

Abstract

In Urama, there are two clause-final particles, ka and ra, that encode a variety of both semantic and pragmatic meanings.While previous approaches have treated these particles as clause-type markers or evidential morphemes, this paper argues that one of these particles, ka, has another previously undocumented function in conversation: to mark speaker-knowledge and what the speaker assumes the addressee to know.We term these interactional uses of ka and ra.Functionally, the interactional use of ka follows from its clause-typing and speech act properties.Theoretically, Urama represents a language that has a grammatical strategy for tracking information in the Common Ground, which is close in spirit to evidentiality and clause-typing, but qualitatively different.

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