Epistemology in linguistic analysis: a case study from Japanese and Okinawan

Abstract

This study aims to incorporate the concept of epistemology developed in philosophy into linguistic analyses, by somewhat altering its original definition in philosophy as the study of the nature and scope of knowledge to refer here to the study of the relationships between the speaker's knowledge and its manifestation in language. More specifically, the speaker's knowledge is defined as sources of information which include the following major categories: basic knowledge, perception, inference, report and hearsay. Basic knowledge represents information acquired through academic, experiential, cultural and religious settings and is firmly believed to be true by the speaker. Perception includes information acquired through our five senses. Inference refers to information obtained through deliberation and thinking. Both report and hearsay indicate secondary information. Following the categorization of the five distinct information sources, three major linguistic forms in Japanese and Okinawan are analyzed as to how they specifically indicate the above-mentioned sources of information. These three linguistic forms include verbal suffixes such as an, utan and een in Okinawan and ta, te iru and te aru in Japanese; Okinawan sentence-final forms, doo, saa, sa, tee, joo and Ndi; and the complementizers si, Ndisi and Ndi in Okinawan and no, koto and to in Japanese.