A metalinguistic analysis of the terminology of evidential categories: experiential, conjecture or deduced?

Abstract

While evidential categories have similar meanings and uses cross-linguistically, the names given to the categories tend to vary. This article surveys the terms for evidentials used in descriptive grammars of 51 languages that have at least three evidential categories. Comparing terms to find common terminological tendencies can provide useful insights into the descriptions of categories. There is great deal of term synonymy and term polysemy, but each evidential category has its typical terms that are semantically motivated. The term synonymy is the result of emphasizing different semantic aspects of the evidential categories, which leads to variable term choices. There is terminological overlap between categories involving sensory perception (i.e. visual, direct, and nonvisual sensory evidentials), inference, and second-hand information, which suggests that they may not always be considered sufficiently conceptually distinct to merit unique terms, especially when the terms for inferential and assumptive evidentials are frequently created from the same words. The variation of the terminology is also connected to how the understanding of evidentiality and relationship to other adjacent categories has developed.