Negotiating knowledge in Datooga interaction

This is an account of preliminary work looking at how Datooga speakers negotiate knowledge in their everyday conversation. Linguistic resources associated with knowing and not knowing will be examined (specifically, questions and the epistemic particle néada) as they are used in everyday interaction, particularly among children. From a linguistic perspective, examination of this data is a treatment of a particular set of linguistic resources and how they are used. From an anthropological perspective, this talk asks questions about the extent to which Datooga children's use of these linguistic resources says something about how they understand social organization.