Evidentials in Linguistics

Abstract

The term ‘evidentials’ is generally applied to a repertoire of grammatical devices coding different kinds of evidence on which statements are based: (a) markers indicating the source of the speaker's information or knowledge, and (b) epistemic markers coding the speaker's attitude toward that knowledge. In this broad sense, evidentials qualify the source in different ways (hearsay, inference, appearance) and the truth value of an utterance. This article is concerned with three major issues: the so-called ‘pure evidential systems,’ the core meaning of evidentiality, and the relation of evidentiality to modality. It is argued that the key to evidentiality is the speaker's disclaimer of responsibility, organized along a continuum of degrees of disengagement with respect to the content of the speaker's utterance; it is the grammatical manifestation of a two-dimensional operation binding simultaneously the event's own spatial and temporal coordinates (event time reference) and the speaker's speech time reference. From a typological point of view, the semantic space of evidentiality is articulated around two fundamental meanings: inferential and reportive (including an unspecified third person, hearsay, rumor, common knowledge, tales, and myths). The (ad)mirative meaning of evidential constructions (expressing surprise or irony) is an extension of the reportive or inferential meaning. Data is represented from Native American (Tuyuca, Wintu, Maricopa), Tibetan, Balkan, and Middle Eastern languages.