MapLE project

The MapLE project is funded by an NWO Vici grant (VI.C.231-014) and hosted at Leiden University. It runs from 1 September 2024 until 31 August 2029.

For details of the project content, please read below or see the full project description.

How languages show what speakers know

In a conversation, you give all sorts of extra information to the addressee through language, for example whether the message is surprising, how certain you are, or what the source of the information is. The MapLE project aims to chart how this extra information is organised in our minds, focusing on how African languages express the knowledge of the speaker and the addressee. This way, we can discover whether this organisation is the same for people or influenced by the language you speak.

Past research has concentrated on specific phenomena such as evidentiality, epistemic modality, egophoricity and many others. These are, in a certain sense, the tiles that compose the mosaic of our conceptual space. These tiles’ borders are hardly ever set in stone – they merge and mix. Here are some of the phenomena whose interrelatedness we will explore:

Evidentiality encoding the source of information for an utterance as visual,
non-visual, hearsay, and so on.

Epistemic primacy encoding the right of
a speaker to assert something based on the distribution of knowledge among the speech participants
Egophoricity encoding the involvement of the speakers in the exchange and also who is the anchor of the information.
Epistemic modality encoding the degree of certainty.
Best possible grounds (BPG) encoding that the speaker is asserting something having the best possible information available to back it up.
Unexpectedness encoding that the utterance deviates from the expectation; this can be the expectation of the speaker, the hearer or others.