First person evidential forms as politeness strategies in Udmurt
Rebeka KUBITSCH/Zoltán NÈMETH
University of Szeged / Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra
(kubitsch.rebeka@gmail.com / nemetx@gmail.com)
Keywords: politeness, evidentiality, pluricentric, Udmurt, northern variant, southern variant
The aim of the presentation is to show the possible differences in the use of 1st person evidential between the Northern and Southern speakers of the Udmurt language, compared to the standard version. The difference could be caused by the fact that the language of the northern speakers is more exposed to Russian which doesn’t have grammatical evidentiality, but the language of the southern speakers is affected more by the neighboring Turkic languages, e.g. Tatar, which has grammatical evidentiality (Greed 2014: 71).
Udmurt is a Uralic language, part of the Permic subgroup, spoken by 339 800 speakers, of which most live in the Udmurt Republic located between the Vyatka and Kama rivers in the Russian Federation (Ethnologue). The speakers are Udmurt-Russian bilinguals, occasionally their third language is Tatar (Turkic) in addition. The strong domination of Russian in cities and the administrational life is typical (Winkler 2001: 5).
Udmurt distinguishes evidentiality only in the past tenses, furthermore these are distinguishable in firsthand (a.k.a. 1st past) and non-firsthand (a.k.a. 2nd past) evidentials (Aikhenvald 2004: 28). Firsthand evidential describes witnessed events, while non-firsthand evidential forms cover several semantic parameters in relation to the information source (reportative, inferential, assumption), which also has other functions that are not related to the source of information (‘token’ of genre, mirativity, non-volitionality, politeness) (Winkler 2001, Siegl 2004, Kubitsch 2017).
If a language has restrictions on the use of evidential that usually involves first person forms (Aikhenvald 2004: 219). Typologically, if first person evidential forms are allowed, their core function is expressing lack of consciousness and unintentional actions (Aikhenvald 2014: 30, Curnow 2003: 39). Udmurt first person effect, beside other semantic characteristics, that are not discussed in this presentation, shows this meaning as well (Skribnik & Kehayov 2018: 542) and hence it might function as politeness, because as Szili (2013:138) summarizes the ideas of Blum-Kulka and J. House (1989): when we apologies we would like to maintain the harmony that was disintegrated by ourselves.
The comparison between the use of first person evidentiality is examined on the answers of 1st and 2nd year Udmurt students of the Udmurt State University, in the topic of apologizing, collected during a fieldwork in October, 2017. We show by quantitative measures, whether our hypothesis that among the young Udmurt speakers the southern speakers use 1st person evidentiality more than the northern speakers of the same age.
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