Evidentiality and deixis in narrative retelling

Abstract

Evidentiality, the linguistic coding of source and reliability of information, has long been characterized as a deictic phenomenon in language (Jakobson, 1957; Schlichter, 1986; Woodbury, 1986). Although it is generally accepted that evidential forms function to index information to a source and an interpreter of that source (typically the speaker), there has been little study of the ways in which speakers make use of this property in discourse. This paper presents an analysis of evidential use in Macedonian narrative retellings that clarifies the deictic function of evidentiality in discourse. A version of Deictic Center Theory (Duchan et al., 1995), a recent framework developed specifically for narrative analysis, is used to show how evidential markers are used to build the perspective structure of narrative texts and how they are manipulated by speakers to express information from different viewpoints.