Evidentials and Person

Abstract

This chapter presents an overview of salient issues regarding the correlation between evidentiality and person. A synthesis of research findings is provided and illustrated by empirical data. The person category relevant for evidentiality is shown to be the ‘speaking person’, which translates into various grammatical persons depending on the grammatical construction. The person-sensitive distribution of evidential forms is attributable to features like control, observability, and access to knowledge, and may be creatively manipulated along an evidential directness cline, such that an evidential value reserved for the speaking person may be employed to assert intimate knowledge about another person, and conversely, a reduced evidential value may be selected in self-reports to tone down first-person involvement, exhibiting ‘first-person effects’. Also elucidated herein is how the addressee’s perspective, another critical person factor in evidentiality, shapes evidential formation and selection.

La interrelación entre evidencialidad y ergatividad (escindida): una comparación tipológica entre el español, las lenguas romances y otras familias lingüísticas

“…Estas se refieren a la fuente de información que tiene que ver con los procesos del hablante, en comparación con la (no) marcación de evidenciales para la segunda y tercera personas. En takuu, la marca egofórica surge para actos volitivos, mientras que los actos incontrolables y sobrevenidos se consignan mediante otro morfema distinto (Sun, 2018). La egoforicidad se da ampliamente en lenguas tibetanas y birmanas, de la zona del Daguestán, ciertas lenguas mongoles y en áreas de Papúa Nueva Guinea (Aikhenvald, 2018a), es decir, en variedades ergativas.…”

Beyond evidentiality, the case of Ladakhi inok & siblings [HL Archive 13]

“…Other terms have been 'locutor' (Aikhenvald 2003(Aikhenvald to 2015, 'asserter' (Creissels 2008), 'informant' (Bickel 2008), 'speaking person' (Sun 2018), 'enunciator/ énonciateur' or 'perceiver' (San Roque & Loughnane 2012. Unlike Zemp (2018: 535, n. 55), I should think that agent or person related terms should better be avoided as they may lead (and have led) to misunderstandings.…”

Knowing in interaction: An introduction

“…A second well-known parameter is the interaction of epistemic marking with person (Bergqvist and Kittilä 2017;Sun 2018) and, intersecting with this, the behaviour of epistemic marking in interrogatives (San Roque et al 2017), where evidentials and egophoric markers frequently (but not universally) exhibit an origo shift from speaker to addressee. Interactive problem-solving tasks are more likely to trigger questions and other types of soliciting information than narrative tasks (unless the latter elicit dialogue within the narrative).…”