Epistememes in Australian languages∗

This paper presents a typology of a class of forms traditionally called ‘interrogatives’ or ‘interrogative/indefinites’ in descriptive grammars of Australian languages. The analysis of the meanings and functions of these forms is based on the notion, first espoused in Durie (1985), that there exists a coherent closed word class, here called ‘epistememe’, whose function is to categorize types of knowledge and whose use is based on contexts where knowledge is at issue. A corpus of epistememe forms in twenty‐six Australian languages is used to examine the nature of the epistememe class in this language family. It is shown that there is a significant amount of cross‐linguistic similarity in the grammatical properties, the categories of knowledge that are encoded, and the functions of the epistememe class. The range of data and the degree of cross‐linguistic regularity suggest that there is much more to be said concerning the linguistic properties of the epistememe class in Australian languages. However, further understanding of its nature can only be achieved when description and analysis of its properties are given a greater priority in the Australian descriptive tradition.