Attitude Markers and Conversational Implicatures in Turkana Speech Acts

Turkana has a set of particles expressing attitudes on the part of the speaker towards the propositional content of utterances in which such markers are used. Attitude markers in Turkana form a closed set whose distributional behavior partly follows from syntactic principles of the language. The absence of these attitude markers from certain syntactic positions follows from their lexical meaning and from pragmatic structure. Their current meaning is argued to have emerged through metonymic extension in certain lexical items, and through conventionalisation of their conversational implicatures. In addition some methodological issues are discussed concerning the interaction between grammar and culture-specific language use, by means of a comparison with similar markers in a number of other languages.