Evidentiality and language contact

Oxford Handbooks Online

Every language has a way of saying how one knows what one is talking about, and what one thinks about what one knows. In some languages, one always has to specify the information source on which it is based—whether the speaker saw the event, or heard it, or inferred it based on something seen or on common sense, or was told about it by someone else. This is the essence of evidentiality, or grammatical marking of information source—an exciting category loved by linguists, journalists, and the general public. This volume provides a state-of-the art view of evidentiality in its various guises, their role in cognition and discourse, child language acquisition, language contact, and language history, with a specific focus on languages which have grammatical evidentials, including numerous languages from North and South America, Eurasia and the Pacific, and also Japanese, Korean, and signed languages.

Human cognitive processing, 2018

Quaestiones Disputatae, 2020

Despite the extensive search that has been done on the phenomenon of evidentiality in the discourse, i.e. the coding of the information source, there are still terminological and conceptual discrepancies that need to be laid out. The present paper presents a theoretical framework of evidentiality. It starts with an examination of the scope of evidentiality in terms of grammar and semantics, ending up with a full understanding of the notion as a functional-conceptual domain. The discussion also focuses on the relationship between evidentiality and epistemic modality since this is still an open-ended issue in the field. We support that a thorough study of particular evidential forms, such as reportative evidential, would be needed as a vibrant continuation of this theoretical revision

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2018

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, along...

Intercultural Pragmatics, 2014

2006

Evidence for Evidentiality, 2018