Evidentiality

Abstract

This chapter sets out semantic and analytic parameters for understanding evidentials—closed grammatical sets whose main meaning is information source. A noun phrase may have its own evidentiality specification, different from that of a verb. Other means of expressing information source offer open-ended options in terms of their semantics, and can be more flexible in their scope. Evidentiality is distinct from tense, aspect, modality, mirativity, and egophoricity. An evidential can be questioned or be within the scope of negation. The concept of evidentiality is different from the lay person’s notion of ‘evidence’. Evidentiality involves numerous semantic parameters and cannot be reduced to a simplistic ‘direct’ versus ‘indirect’ opposition. Evidentiality needs to be worked out inductively, based on painstaking work with primary materials on a language, rather than on translation and elicitation. Guidelines for fieldworkers investigating evidentials are offered in the Appendix, alongside a glossary of terms.

Input-output Relations in Early Epistemic Modality in Russian: a Corpus-based Approach*

“…Indicators of authority (or authorization) connect epistemic modality with the source of information (i. e. the category of evidentiality [28,5]): according to N / to rumours, in my opinion etc. Such a way evidentiality finds its expression in Russian language, where this category is not grammaticalised.…”

Emphatic Topicalization and the Structure of the Left Periphery: Evidence from German and Bangla

“…However, ET has been identified as a formal syntactic operation by other linguists, for German by Frey (2010), for Sicilian by Cruschina (2011), and for Nupe by Kandybowicz (2013). The phenomenon seems to be related to mirativity, a kind of evidentiality marking (see Aikhenvald 2004) by which an utterance is marked (mostly by a suffix) as conveying information that is new or unexpected to the speaker (see Delancey 1997 for crosslinguistic findings). The meaning is difficult to articulate precisely.…”

“… Fanselow () suspects that certain topicalization structures are “more ‘emphatic’” but then seems to doubt that this “impression can be made precise” and wonders “how it will formally figure in the attraction account.” However, ET has been identified as a formal syntactic operation by other linguists, for German by Frey (), for Sicilian by Cruschina (), and for Nupe by Kandybowicz (). The phenomenon seems to be related to mirativity, a kind of evidentiality marking (see Aikhenvald ) by which an utterance is marked (mostly by a suffix) as conveying information that is new or unexpected to the speaker (see Delancey for crosslinguistic findings). The meaning is difficult to articulate precisely.…”

Questions to the Modus: Semantics, Structure and Pragmatics (Based on the Russian National Corpora)

“…Formal patterns of this MQ are represented by partial questions with compound and simple sentence structures occupying a reactive and rarely initiative position within dialogue units. MQs of authorship lack the redundancy (in opposite to HOW-model), and close relation to the category of evidentiality not grammaticalised in Russian [4,5].…”