The “evidential paradigm” in Persian Classics: princes from Sarandip and other clue interpreters

The rich history of Persian literature reception in the West includes such a major event as the translation of the Persian narrative into European languages. This has influenced the comprehension of a new epistemological paradigm in the humanities. The story under discussion is the first chapter of Amir Khusrav Dihlavi’s poem “Eight Paradises” (Hašt bihišt, 1299–1301), in which the Indian princess tells the Sassanian king Bahram Gur a tale of three princes from Sarandip (Sri Lanka, Ceylon). As the plot progresses, the princes restore the events of the past according to clues and signs and repeatedly demonstrate their firāsa or ability to guess based on the analysis of evidence. The stages of European reception of this story are well known. All this material is discussed in the methodologically famous work “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm” (1986) by Carlo Ginzburg, who connected the “evidential paradigm” with the Arabic firāsa, a “complex notion which, in general, designated the ability to pass, on the basis of clues, directly from the known to the unknown”; Ginzburg noted that the Sarandip princes were famous exactly for that ability. In this article, the Persian prose sources of the Three princes tale are under discussion, as well as some other sagacity stories from Persian didactic books (adab). Among the detective characters Abū ʻAlī ibn Sīnā gained particular popularity; in some stories, the great philosopher and author of the fundamental canon “The Medicine” acts as a doctor who recognizes a disease by symptoms and at the same time as a detective who restores the course of events from evidence and refutes unfair accusations before a judge.

Not a Negation? A Logico-Philosophical Perspective on the Ugaritic Particles lā/ ’al

The negative particles lā/ ’al in Ugaritic change from positive to negative in modal contexts, conditional, questions, disjunctions, etc. They have usually been studied from a Semitic and linguistic points of view. On the basis of their occurrence in Ugaritic texts, we pretend to explain their uncommon behaviour from a philosophical and logico-semantic perspective. Is it possible to translate this linguistic structure in our Modern languages? Starting from a general view of their use in Ugaritic language, we claim that this phenomenon can be more clearly understood in relation to modality. We interpret these negation as a negative evidential paradigm and we explain how they change in different contexts. Methodologically, we make use of formal tools of Dynamic Epistemic Logic in order to provide a more fine-grained understanding of these negations, and their dynamics.

The overabundance of the perfect and the restriction of evidentiality in Standard Azerbaijani: A diachronic study of -(y)Ib and -mIş

This article investigates the historical development and reorganization of variation in the individual cells of the Standard Azerbaijani perfect paradigms, a phenomenon known as overabundance (Thornton 2011, 2012). Unlike many previous examples of overabundance in the literature, the variation of the present perfect in Standard Azerbaijani applies to all the relevant verb lexemes in the language and shows no indication of developing verb classes. Rather, the present study argues that, (i) while there is an ongoing reorganization of this variation, it is along lines of specialization for paradigmatic oppositions in person marking, and (ii) this reorganization is attributable to analogical extension on the basis of structural asymmetries in the person-marking of the evidential paradigm. Differentiation by Person (Dmitriyev 1927, Əfəndiyeva 2005) is an inherent structural property of the Azerbaijani verb paradigm, manifested by analogical change. The synchronic asymmetries in the perfect paradigms are best explained as the result frequency-sensitive changes, i.e., lower frequency categories (but not lexemes) correlate with the persistence of variation.

Ensino de pronúncia: concepções de língua(gem) e de sujeito subjacentes ao Listen and Repeat

Resumo Em vista das mudanças conceituais ocorridas no campo de ensino-aprendizagem de línguas nas últimas décadas, nosso foco é o ensino de pronúncia, cujas propostas metodológicas parecem seguir uma trajetória mais lenta. Considerando que a prática de pronúncia inescapavelmente envolve a repetição, colocamos em discussão a própria noção de repetição, o papel conferido ao aluno em tal prática, como concebemos a relação sujeito-objeto de conhecimento e, consequentemente, as concepções de linguagem/sujeito subjacentes ao trabalho pedagógico. Observamos que a prática de pronúncia geralmente centra-se nos fonemas isolados, negligenciando-se os aspectos prosódicos, e vislumbramos as representações dos professores sobre pronúncia e de seu papel na produção de sentidos. Assim, para encaminharmos nossa reflexão, faremos uma análise microgenética de um dado utilizando o paradigma indiciário, apoiando-nos também nos relatórios do médico Jean Itard, que tentou ensinar a linguagem oral a um menino selvagem e nos trabalhos do Círculo de Bakhtin. O diálogo com as experiências pedagógicas de Itard pode parecer improvável, já que mais de dois séculos nos separam. Contudo, justamente por essa razão, parece-nos bastante produtivo para refletirmos sobre aspectos que ainda permeiam nossa prática. Prática, aliás, mais orientada por técnicas isoladas do que por uma abordagem teoricamente fundamentada. Palavras-chave: Ensino de pronúncia. Aspectos prosódicos. Produção de sentidos. Concepção de linguagem. Jean Itard. Abstract Taking into consideration the conceptual changes that have occurred in language teaching in the past decades, our focus herein is pronunciation teaching, whose methodological proposals seem to follow a slower trajectory. Considering that pronunciation practice inescapably involves repetition, we approach the very notion of repetition, the role assigned to students in such practice, how we conceive the relation subject-object of knowledge and, consequently, the language/subject concepts that underlie the pedagogical work. Noting that pronunciation practice is normally centered on isolated phonemes, neglecting the prosodic aspects, it is possible to envision the teachers’ representations about pronunciation and its role in the production of meaning/sense. Thus, in order to conduct our reflection, we will analyze some data using the evidential paradigm, which will be supported by the reports of Dr. Jean Itard, who tried to teach the oral language to a wild boy, as well as by the work of the Circle of Bakhtin. The dialogue with the pedagogic experiences of Itard may seem unlikely, as over two centuries set us apart. However, exactly for this reason, it seems quite productive in order to reflect upon aspects that still permeate our practice (more guided by isolated techniques than by a theoretically grounded approach). Keywords: Pronunciation teaching. Prosodic aspects. Production of meaning. Language concept. Jean Itard.

Lithuanian Inflection

The chapter gives an overview of Lithuanian nominal and verbal inflection and discusses a number of contentious issues involving the demarcation of case and adposition, inflection and derivation, affix and clitic. The first issue is illustrated by the local cases of Old Lithuanian. These involve original postpositions added to case-marked forms. Lithuanian reflexive verb forms raise questions concerning the demarcation of clitics and affixes as well as that of inflection and derivation. A similar indeterminacy between proclitic and affix adheres to aspect, scope, and negation markers added to the verb. Baltic evidentials are an interesting instance of a syntactic phenomenon becoming morphologized and giving rise to an evidential paradigm. Finally, Lithuanian derivational aspect raises problems analogous to those of Slavic aspect, but these are made more complex by the weaker degree of grammaticalization of aspect in Lithuanian.