Abstract
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‐grammatical continuum. Assuming a broad conception of evidentiality and defining it as a functional category, we study linguistic means that fulfil the function of indicating the source of information for the transmitted content of a certain proposition in Romance languages.
Highlights
In its strict sense evidentiality concerns “the grammatical means of expressing information source, known as evidentials”
Evidentiality is probably the only category that has been successfully transferred from indigenous language descriptions to European languages. In this context it will be shown that evidentiality has an explanatory potential for some linguistic means even in languages which do not have grammaticalized evidentials
A concept of linguistic universals that focuses on functions and allows that not all languages have grammatical means for the realization of the corresponding function seems promising for the description of the category of evidentiality
Summary
In its strict sense evidentiality concerns “the grammatical means of expressing information source, known as evidentials” 1), “in about a quarter of the world’s languages, 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” This is not the case in Romance languages, in English or in German. We can use for this purpose explicit designations of the source or refunctionalise linguistic means with related meaning It is precisely the same problem which was observed by Roman Jakobson: If some grammatical category is absent in a given language, its meaning may be translated into this language by lexical means. These publication titles indicate that it is not systematic facts of the evidential markers of a language that are considered, but the use of linguistic means to fulfil the function of marking the way of accessing the source of knowledge. In this context it will be shown that evidentiality has an explanatory potential for some linguistic means even in languages which do not have grammaticalized evidentials
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