A B S T R A C T While information sources have largely been treated as transparent categories in the literature on evidentiality, understandings of information source can be culturally and situationally variable. This article proposes that the strictly linguistic information encoded in reportative evidentials cannot be cleanly separated from social infl uences. Defi ning an information source, especially when referring to information reported by another person, serves social purposes, such as casting doubt, framing gossip, distancing oneself, or indicating empathy. Using the concept of speaker stance, this study explores the relationship of information source to the interpersonal relationships and interactions that are encoded in this linguistic form. Data from a contact variety of Spanish spoken in central Bolivia provide evidence that diz(que) , a Spanish word, has undergone infl uence from Quechua to become a systematic reportative evidential marker in this variety of Bolivian Spanish. Speakers use information source marking in order to shade subtleties of relationships and authority. (Evidentiality, speaker stance, Andean Spanish, Bolivian Spanish, language contact, linguistic anthropology) *
I n t r o d u c t i o nEvidentials can be described as grammatical or lexical markers that provide information about the source of information for a particular utterance or proposition. Evidentials are used to connect the content of a message to its provenance, to specify where a particular piece of information comes from. reportative evidentials are used to mark information that was verbally reported by another person -that is, secondhand knowledge or hearsay. Like classic cases of overlap between social and structural aspects of language, such as pronoun distinctions (Brown & Gilman 1960 ), reportative evidentials are linguistic markers that refer to a social interaction or relationship. In connecting reference and subjectivity, evidentials constitute a liminal area between formal linguistics and sociolinguistics/linguistic anthropology. In this article, I investigate the relationship between the social and grammatical