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2012, Oxford Handbook of Tense and Aspect
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52 pages
This chapter explores the concept of evidentiality, focusing on how it indicates the source of information for statements made by speakers. The discussion highlights the close relationship between evidentiality, mirativity, and tense/aspect, challenging the prevailing views in the literature that often examine evidentiality primarily in relation to epistemic modality. Through examples from various languages, particularly Tuyuca and Hare, the chapter illustrates how evidential markers are formed and their implications for understanding unexpected events and speaker knowledge.
Journal of Language and Literary Studies, 2025
This article examines evidentiality as a complex and debated concept in linguistics. While scholars disagree on whether evidentiality is a grammatical or lexical category, there is consensus that its core function is to indicate the source of information.
Oxford Handbooks Online
The expression of evidentiality is quite diverse among the languages of the Uto-Aztecan family. This diversity is seen both in the number of terms and associated functional distinctions and in the formal means used to express them. The purpose of this chapter is to synthesize and describe evidential expression across the family, both as a contribution to a typology of evidential systems in the world’s languages and to an understanding of the diachronic development of such systems. All the languages surveyed in this chapter mark, at a minimum, reported information, and most of them also carry some means for marking inference. The grammaticalization and renewal of reportative evidentials is considered. Most of the languages treat direct evidence either as the default or unspecified case. The overt marking of direct, firsthand evidence is rare, and just a few languages express perceptual evidence, either visual or auditory.
Linguistics, 2015
In this paper we argue that the notions generally grouped together under the heading of evidentiality actually belong to four different evidential subcategories, which are different from one another in terms of their semantic scope. The hierarchical, scopal architecture of Functional Discourse Grammar is used to define these four categories. After giving our arguments for this new classification, we test a number of predictions that follow from it concerning the coexistence of evidential subcategories within a language and the co-occurrence of evidential markers in a single clause. We investigate our predictions in a sample of 64 native languages of Brazil. The data from these languages show that the presence of one or more of the four evidential subcategories can be systematically described in terms of an implicational hierarchy.
Discourse Studies
In recent years, the category of evidentiality has also come into use for the description of Romance languages and of German. This has been contingent on a change in its interpretation from a typological category to a semantic-pragmatic category, which allows an application to languages lacking specialised morphemes for the expression of evidentiality. We consider evidentiality to be a structural dimension of grammar, the values of which are expressed by types of constructions that code the source of information which a speaker imparts. If we look at the situation in Romance languages and in German, drawing a boundary between epistemic modality and evidentiality presents problems that are difficult to solve. Adding markers of the source of the speaker’s knowledge often limits the degree of responsibility of the speaker for the content of the utterance. Evidential adverbs are a frequently used means of marking the source of the speaker’s knowledge. The evidential meaning is generalis...
The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, 2011
This article analyses the grammaticalisation of the grammatical category of evidentiality. It explains that evidentiality is a verbal category in its own right and it does not bear any straight-forward relationship to the expression of speaker's responsibility, or attitude to the statement. Grammaticalisation of evidentials follows two general paths. Markers of evidentiality may develop out of grammaticalising a lexical item and an evidential may also evolve out of an evidentiality strategy, acquiring the status of a grammatical system in its own right. Evidentials evolve from a variety of sources, including forms from open classes and from closed classes and reinterpretation and reanalysis of evidentiality strategies.
HYPERBOREUS. STUDIA CLASSICA 23 (2), 2017
The paper aims at drawing attention to certain phenomena in Latin which can be treated as evidential strategies. In Introduction, a brief overview of the existing viewpoints concerning the grammatical category of evidentiality is provided, then a question of the interrelation between evidentiality and epistemic modality is touched upon and author’s methodological approach to the issue is outlined. In the main part of the paper, the author provides an overview of the linguistic strategies used to mark the main types of access to information, i.e. direct (perceptual) evidence, indirect inferential (or presumptive) evidence, and indirect reported evidence. The author singles out thirteen morphological and syntactic means to express different kinds of evidential values (e.g. Infinitive or Participle constructions, historic present, modal use of the subjunctive mood with inferential or reportative overtones, logophoric use of the reflexive pronouns etc.). The author’s claim is that these strategies belong to the grammar rather than to the lexicon of the Latin language and, therefore, can be treated as evidential strategies. Considering these grammatical phenomena as evidential strategies may enrich one’s understanding of the Latin language and help to realize that the traditional inventory of grammatical forms and constructions can express many more values than one might have expected.
in Mario Squartini (ed) Evidentiality between lexicon and grammar. Italian Journal of Linguistics 19.1. 2007, 7-38 , 2007
Drawing on a comparison of two geographically and typologically distantlanguages, Georgian and Italian, this paper aims to provide some insightsinto the patterning of lexical and grammatical strategies in the domain of evidentiality. First of all, in the systems described in this paper evidentialityis signaled in opposition to neutral unmarked discourse. In both languagessome verb forms, associated with various temporal and aspectual values,have taken on evidential meanings in specific contexts. Neither language hasdeveloped a morphological evidential category. A typologically relevant fea-ture is that inferential and reportive evidentiality are articulated differently:they cluster together in the Georgian perfect but are distinguished in Italian. A further conclusion of this study is that the means to express evidentialityare a domain in movement, which admits several intermediate stages, as ismanifested by the presence of grammaticalization processes involving lexicalitems and the increasing use of adverbial constructions
Evidentials in Uralic languages. In Aikhenvald, Alexandra Yu. (ed.) 2018, The Oxford Handbook of Evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 525–553., 2018
This chapter gives an overview of Uralic evidential systems: of the type A3 in Finnic, A2 in Mari and Permic, A1 and A2 in Ob-Ugric (with strong mirativization), of B3, C3, and higher types in Samoyedic, i.e. very different in different branches of the Uralic family. Due to this and to similarities in both semantic values and coding with their geographical neighbours, grammatical evidentiality cannot be considered an inherited feature of Uralic languages-but rather appeared due to areal diffusion and independent innovations with different sources, from past tenses to desubordination. Uralic evidentials are not used in commands and tend to be incompatible with non-indicative moods; they are rarely found in negative clauses and questions, in which case they are outside the scope of the negative/interrogative operator; i.e. the content of the clause is negated/questioned, not the information source.
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Cadernos de Linguística
Defined narrowly, evidentiality pertains to the sources of knowledge or evidence whereby the speaker feels entitled to make a factual claim. But evidentiality may also be conceived more broadly as both providing epistemic justification and reflecting speaker’s attitude towards the validity of the communicated information, and hearer’s potential acceptability of the information, derived from the degree of reliability of the source and mode of access to the information. Evidentiality and epistemic modality are subcategories of the same superordinate category, namely a category of epistemicity. Since the first seminal works on evidentiality (Chafe and Nichols 1986), studies have for the most part centred on languages where the grammatical marking of the information source is obligatory (for example Willett 1988; Aikhenvald 2004). Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in the study of the domain of evidentiality in European languages, which rely on strategies along the lexico‐gr...
Studies in Language, 2012
This volume contains thirteen chapters, aU relating to the expression of perception (seeing and hearing), and information source in a selection of European languages. The past decade has seen a surge of interest in epistemology, evidentiality, and other grammatical, and also lexical, devices related to the expression of information source, and attitudes to information (see a comprehensive bibliography in Aikhenvald 2011). The ways in which speakers of different languages express the source of knowledge, and their attitudes to it, are among what can be caUed 'fashionable' issues in modern linguistics. Publication of this volume fits in with this trend. In the traditional, and accepted, view, which goes back to Boas' work (1938) and is foUowed in major sources (see a summary in Jacobsen 1986, Johanson & Utas 2000, Comrie 2000, and surveys in Aikhenvald 2004, 2011), evidentiality is a grammatical category in its own right with information source as its primary meaning. It does not bear any straightforward relationship to truth, the validity of a statement, or the speaker's responsibility. Evidentials may have extensions of certainty, uncertainty, probabüity, doubt and commitment, or lack thereof. But the presence of these, and other, extensions does not make evidentials into 'modals', a subcategory of epistemic or any other modality, nor of irrealis (contrary to Palmer 1986, and Plungian 2001). Every language has a way of saying how one knows what one is talking about, and what one thinks about the information one has. In about one quarter of the world's languages, there is obligatory grammatical marking for information source, known as evidentiality. In Boas' (1938:133) words, 'whUe for us definiteness, number, and time are obligatory aspects, we find in another language [...] source of information-whether seen, heard, or inferred-as obligatory aspects'. Languages with evidentiality encoded in their grammar are found aU over the world-including Europe. SmaU evidentiality systems have been described, inter alia, for Estonian, Livonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Basque (contrary to what the editors claim in their Introduction, p. 3 of the volume under review) (see, for
Evidentiality — a grammatical expression of information source (Aikhenvald 2004, 2014) —is often expressed on a clausal level, and its marking is associated with the verb. In a few languages, a noun phrase can acquire its own evidential specification. Evidentiality can be expressed autonomously, or be fused with another grammatical category, including aspect, tense or mood for verbs, or spatial distance and topicality for noun phrases. We investigate interactions and dependencies between evidentiality and other grammatical categories, both verbal and nominal. A number of such dependencies can be explained by the diachronic development and history of evidentials.
According to Aikhenvald (2004: 1), evidentiality is a “grammatical category whose primary meaning is information source.” In languages which have this category, “every statement must specify the type of source on which it is based – for example, whether the speaker saw it, or heard it, or inferred it from indirect evidence, or learnt it from someone else.”Given this definition, so-called visual evidentials within Aikhenvald’s framework are expected to indicate that the information conveyed in a statement was obtained visually, viz. that a statement is based on visual evidence. A closer look at such forms, however, reveals that they do not actually indicate visual evidence. Instead, they denote things“one is sure of” (Aikhenvald 2004: 20, 153), the“speaker’s internal states” (Aikhenvald 2004: 87, 190), “events for which the speaker claims reponsibility” (Aikhenvald 2004: 87, 191), or imply “the speaker’s participation in the action” (Aikhenvald 2004: 189, 192). At the same time, many of the verb forms analyzed as visual evidentials are actually formally unmarked for evidentiality. After looking at a few evidential contrasts involving direct markers in Amazonian languages, the present paper scrutinizes Aikhenvald’s (2004) section advocating the visual evidential analysis of the least marked verb form in a language with grammatical evidentiality. Consulting also the primary sources on the languages discussed there, we conclude that there is little support for this analysis.
The Grammar of Knowledge, 2014
Every language has a way of speaking about how one knows what one says, and what one thinks about what one knows. In any language, there are ways of phrasing inferences, assumptions, probabilities, and possibilities, and expressing disbelief. These epistemological meanings and their cultural correlates are the subject matter of the present volume. In a number of the world's languages, every sentence must specify the information source on which it is based-whether the speaker saw the event, or heard it, or inferred it based on visual evidence or on common sense, or learnt it from another person. As Frans Boas (1938: 133) put it, 'while for us definiteness, number, and time are obligatory aspects, we find in another language location near the speaker or somewhere else, source of information-whether seen, heard, or inferred-as obligatory aspects: 'Evidentiality' is grammaticalized marking of information source. This is a bona fide grammatical category, on a par with tense, aspect, mood, modality, directionality, obviation, negation, and person. Just as 'person' can be fused with 'gender' and 'number', evidentiality may be fused with tense or aspect or mood. Its expression, and meanings, may correlate with sentence types: evidentials in questions may have overtones different from evidentials in statements. Exclamatory sentences may have no evidentials at all. Evidentials in commands are very limited in their meanings. In §1, we briefly revisit the relationship between evidentiality and information source. §2 presents a potted summary of evidentials and their meanings across the world. In §3, we turn to the means other than grammatical evidentials which can cover information source, and attitude to information. Evidentials may have non-evidential extensions.
Journal of pragmatics, 2001, 33.3, 349-357., 2001
The paper discusses the cross-linguistic classification of evidential values (including the so-called admirative value) and proposes a typology of evidential systems based on the distinction between ‘direct’, ‘reflected’, and ‘mediated’ evidence.
Word Structure, 2012
This paper describes the extensive tense/evidentiality system of Mamaindê, a northern Nambikwara language of Brazil. This morphological system performs a dual function in Mamaindê, that of marking tense as well as indicating information source. First, each of the six evidentials are discussed in detail, followed by a section on the use of evidentials as 'extensions' with secondary semantic properties. After comments regarding the possible origins of this particular morphological category, a comparative section highlights the similarities and differences between the various evidential systems discovered thus far in the Nambikwara family, as well as some parallels with evidentiality within other Amazonian languages. The systems most similar to Mamaindê are those found in Lakondê, a northern Nambikwara language (Telles & Wetzels 2006), Tariana, an Arawak language (Aikhenvald 2004: 60) and Tuyuca, East Tucanoan (Payne 1997: 256-7). The paper closes with a short commentary on the possible connections between Mamaindê evidentials and Mamaindê culture.
