As language is paramount in interpersonal communication, an important question for the investigation of the interplay of epistemic trust and vigilance concerns the role of language in strengthening or weakening the two. For instance, evidentials – morphological markers that indicate the source of the speaker’s knowledge – have been shown to play a role in the formation of selective epistemic trust in children. Moreover, languages differ with respect to the communicative practices in which evidentials are involved. For instance, quotative resources can be employed by speakers of various languages in order to reduce the speaker‘s responsibility for the truthfulness of the proposition conveyed. In Yurakaré (isolate, Bolivia), however, the reportative evidential enclitic =ya is only used in utterances that perform informing actions where, moreover, the information is presented as fully reliable. This means that in Yurakaré, the reportative evidential in fact increases the speaker‘s responsibility for the truth of the utterance, given that it includes the speaker’s judgment of the trustworthiness of the person who contributed the information. Reported information for which the reliability is doubtful – or which is known to be untrue – are formulated as direct quotations instead. Here are two corpus examples illustrating the difference:

In our current research, we build on these insights and ask: What role do language-specific resources play in epistemic trust in everyday conversation and science communication? Do cross-linguistic differences in epistemic expressions impact on the formation of epistemic trust? An how can we possibly use the linguistic resources available in a given language to (re)build epistemic trust in science communication?