About me

I am a descriptive and documentary linguist specialising in the languages of South America, and with particular interest in the linguistic and cultural area of Andean foothils:  the limit between the Andes and the Amazon. I have spent time doing fieldwork in Ecuador, working with speakers of the Amazonian Kichwa  in the province of Napo. 

My main theoretical interest is evidentiality and epistemicity, and in how those categories are expressed in everyday, spoken discourse.

I am also interested in the issues related minority and endangered languages, including language planning and policy, sociolinguistic issues surrounding language loss and language shift, and language support and revitalisation initiatives. 

I am a founding co-director of Language Landscape, an organisation dedicated to raising awareness of linguistic diversity. 

Research

My current research project focuses on the development of intersubjective marking in the Quechuan language family, and aims to situate it in a cross-linguistic perspective, thus contributing to the typological work on intersubjectivity as a semantic category.

The project’s point of departure is the analysis of the intersubjective semantics of epistemic markers attested in Amazonian Kichwa: a group of mutually intelligible, under-described Quechuan varieties spoken in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

Publications

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• Thesis (Doc) Discourse enclitics in Tena Kichwa
  2016. Karolina Zofia Grzech, Irina Nikolaeva.
• Article Language Landscape
  2018. Karolina Grzech, Ebany Dohle. Lingue e linguaggi 25, 65-80
• Article Autoridad epistémica y atenuación en Tena Kichwa
  2017. Karolina Grzech.
• Article ¿Es necesario elegir entre la estandarización de las lenguas minoritarias y la vitalidad de sus variantes?
  2017. Karolina Grzech.
• Article The marker =ga and topicality in Tena Kichwa
  2016. Karolina Grzech.
• Article The non-evidential meaning of the Tena Kichwa 'direct evidential'
  2016. Karolina Grzech.

  Quechuan languages are known to have a three-way evidential distinction between direct, indirect and reported source of information (cf. Willett 1988; Aikhenvald 2004). The Quechuan enclitic =mi has previously been analysed e.g. as marking direct evidence and certainty (Weber 1986; Floyd 1997), or the 'best possible ground' for making an assertion (Faller 2002). However, neither of the to-date analyses is adequate for describing the meaning of the enclitic =mi in Tena Kichwa, a Quechuan variety spoken in the Ecuadorian Amazon. In this article, I discuss the properties of the Tena Kichwa =mi, and show that in this variety, the marker is best analysed not as an evidential, but as a marker of epistemic primacy.

• Article Language Landscape
  2014. Ebany Dohle, Karolina Grzech, Charlotte Hemmings.
• Article Planning language, planning identity
  2013. Karolina Grzech.

Show all publications by Karolina Grzech at Stockholm University