Evidential Strategies Research Articles

A Study on the Evidential Strategies and Subjectification Conditions of Modern Chinese ‘着’ and ‘起來’

A Study on the Evidential Strategies and Subjectification Conditions of Modern Chinese ‘着’ and ‘起來’

The Syntax of Speech Acts: Deictic Inversion as an Evidential Strategy in English

This paper presents empirical evidence to support the so-called syntactization of discourse, that is, the projection of relevant pragmatic features in the narrow syntax. In particular, it analyses deictic inversion in English, a construction which is used by the speaker to point at a proximal or distal location and bring the addressee’s attention to an entity related to that location (e.g., Here comes the bus). It offers a novel account of this construction, which takes it to be an evidential strategy in a language that does not have standard evidential markers; this evidential status explains its main differences with locative inversion, a construction with which it is pragmatically and structurally related. Deictic inversion therefore receives a natural explanation in a framework that maps syntax with the speech act and introduces in the derivation pragmatic information about the participants in the communicative exchange and about the source of the information for the proposition asserted.

Evidential strategies in English: not just lexical

Abstract English is generally considered to lack grammaticalized evidential markers (Aikhenvald 2004. Evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press). However, Mélac (2022. The grammaticalization of evidentiality in English. English Language and Linguistics 26(2). 331–359) argues that certain uses of seem and other English verbs have grammaticalized as evidentials. He also offers several other examples of what he calls “(semi-)grammaticalized” evidentials. In this article I provide evidence that English also has grammaticalized evidential strategies in the choice between the present and past tenses when either is possible in a particular context, as well as in the use of certain determiners with proper names referring to specific individuals. The relevant contexts involve representation of particular points of view relating broadly to information source through tense and determiner choices. This analysis supports the work of researchers such as Figueras-Bates and Kotwica (2020. Introduction: Evidentiality, epistemicity and mitigation in Spanish. Corpus Pragmatics 4. 1–9: 13), among others, that evidentiality is best seen as “a discursive-pragmatic phenomenon.”

Agnogenic practices and corporate political strategy: the legitimation of UK gambling industry-funded youth education programmes.

Agnogenic practices-designed to create ignorance or doubt-are well-established strategies employed by health-harming industries (HHI). However, little is known about their use by industry-funded organizations delivering youth education programmes. We applied a previously published framework of corporate agnogenic practices to analyse how these organizations used them in three UK gambling industry-funded youth education programmes. Evidential strategies adopted previously by other HHI are prominent in the programmes' practitioner-facing materials, evaluation design and reporting and in public statements about the programmes. We show how agnogenic practices are employed to portray these youth education programmes as 'evidence-based' and 'evaluation-led'. These practices distort the already limited evidence on these educational initiatives while legitimizing industry-favourable policies, which prioritize commercial interests over public health. Given the similarities in political strategies adopted by different industries, these findings are relevant to research and policy on other HHI.

An evidential perfect in Wangerooge Frisian

ABSTRACT This paper analyses the use of verbal tense forms in Wangerooge Frisian, a West Germanic language spoken on the Wadden Sea island Wangerooge until the early twentieth century. Specifically, the use of the present, past, and perfect constructions is investigated in a corpus of texts from the nineteenth century. It is argued that the Wangerooge Frisian perfect could be used as a non-firsthand evidential strategy marking the propositional content as hearsay or inferred. While such evidential perfects are cross-linguistically well attested, they are generally thought to be uncommon in Western European languages. The Wangerooge Frisian case thus shows the value of lesser-studied vernaculars for the typology of European languages.

Marking the sources of knowledge, asserting the epistemic stance

Abstract At the beginning of the 20th century, the Jesuit priest Joseph Deharveng (1867–1929) was one of the main representatives of a language correction movement based essentially on the standard Parisian model of French. Deharveng’s goal was to clear the practices of French-speaking Belgians of everything which seemed to deviate from this supposed ‘good usage’ of French. Under the evocative title Corrigeons-nous!, Deharveng published six anthologies from 1922 to 1928 reproducing the articles published in his language column “Récréation philologique et grammaticale” in the Brussels newspaper La Jeunesse. The present study addresses how Deharveng makes use of evidential markers, that is, linguistic features to express the sources of knowledge in his language column. The distribution of evidential markers in Deharveng’s column is compared to those in two other Franco-Belgian language columns published by Albert Doppagne (1912–2003) from 1960 to 1987 in the Brussels newspaper Le Soir and by Michel Francard (1952–) from 2018 to 2022, also in Le Soir. The aim of this comparison is to discern author-specific and language ideology-driven similarities and differences in the patterning of evidential strategies in language columns.

Verbs of perception and evidentiality in English/French translation

Abstract Differences between verbs of perception in English and French have often been a subject of theoretical conjecture, but seldom studied empirically. Four such verbs (En. hear, see, Fr. entendre, voir) were thus inventoried in a 13.5m-word bidirectional English/French translation corpus. A statistically significant difference between translators and authors was found for hear and entendre. Correlations between source and target texts were statistically significant for all verbs. Quantitative analysis of random samples revealed five regular alternatives to word-for-word translation. Qualitative data support the hypothesis that verbs of perception may follow different “evidential strategies” in English and French. An approach combining quantitative and qualitative analysis to identify translators closest to target language norms offers a new model for researchers and translators.

Plagiarism at crossroads

Considered in academia a serious offence, plagiarism is an act of copying or stealing someone else’s ideas or work and presenting them as one’s own [1]. In a broader sense, plagiarism is using an author’s words, ideas, reflections and thoughts without properly acknowledging them [2]. A well-known and growing issue in academia, plagiarism constitutes a significant proportion of the serious deviations from ethical research practice [3]. The advancement of technology and the widespread use of the Internet and the emerging AI assistance available for all have made it easier to commit plagiarism. Yet, on the flip side, avoiding plagiarism is now more convenient due to the abundance of plagiarism detection tools. Plagiarism applications generate a similarity report that highlights potential manifestations of plagiarism. The accuracy of plagiarism checker tools and their reports on determining the academic integrity of emerging academic writing contents becomes questionable due to the contradicting nature of the concerned variables of plagiarism tool algorithms and that of academic writing ethics. Academic writing ethics taught across global curriculums places a significant value on the use of duly cited direct quotations (verbatim copies) as a strong evidential strategy while plagiarism reports count textual similarity as a key 52 variable to flag plagiarism.

— Yiqtol as Evidential Strategy in Biblical Hebrew

Abstract The goal of this study is to argue that the — yiqtol construction has an evidential meaning when employed with reference to the past. The yiqtol functions in these situations as an evidential strategy and is used to express the source of information. For instance, Exod. 15:1, which famously begins with , should be understood as ‘then (as reported / as they say) Moses sang’. The words added between brackets refer to the source of information. In most biblical passages where this rare and puzzling construction is attested the evidential yiqtol appears with deictic markers that tie the world of the narrative to that of the authors and of the audience. Interestingly, paratextual elements and redactional observations support the idea that we are dealing with evidential strategies. Finally, the Hebrew Bible seems to contain additional instances of the evidential yiqtol in a similar construction ( — yiqtol).

Evidential Strategies in Financial Statement Analysis: A Corpus Linguistic Text Mining Approach to Bankruptcy Prediction

The qualitative information of companies’ financial statements provides useful information that can increase the accuracy of bankruptcy prediction models. In this research, a dataset of 924,903 financial statements from 355,704 German companies classified into solvent, financially distressed, and bankrupt companies using the Amadeus database from Bureau van Dijk was examined. The results provide empirical evidence that a corpus linguistic approach implementing evidential strategy analysis towards financial statements helps to distinguish between companies’ financial situations. They show that companies use different approaches and confidence assessments when evaluating their financial statements based on solvency and vary their use of evidential strategies accordingly. This leads to the proposition of a procedure to quantify and generate features based on the analysis of evidential strategies that can be used to improve corporate bankruptcy prediction. The results presented here stem from an interdisciplinary adaptation of linguistic findings and provide future research with another means of analysis in the area of text mining.

Attracting and Managing Talents in Modern Day Political Parties: Evidential Strategies from Nigeria’s Democratic Process

The broad objective of this paper was to explore the place of succession planning and talent management among political parties in Nigeria. Specifically, the paper seeks to determine the strategies for attracting and managing talents in modern political parties with the aid of empirical evidence from Nigeria’s electoral process. The study employed the survey method of research in which the data required for the study were collected through the instruments of questionnaire and in-depth interviews. Four dominant political parties were selected out of the current 63 registered political parties in Nigeria. Quota and stratified sampling techniques were mostly used in their sample selection; and samples of 400 respondents were selected. The data collected were presented, analyzed and interpreted through the use of tables, frequencies, and percentages. The findings of the study indicated that talents can be attracted to a political party and managed through a generous reward system, good working environment, membership development policy, authority delegation, challenging jobs and committee involvement, harmonious working relationship with party officials and hierarchies. Also, talents can be managed for a party’s survival using membership development policy, motivation and other retention strategies. Our test of hypothesis also indicated that a political party’s continuity depends on the application of these strategies. Based on these findings, the study suggested that political parties should take deliberate steps to put in place some motivational and staff/membership development policies that will expose its functionaries to global best practices in democracy and party management. Keywords: Party Management, Talent Management, Political Environment, Succession Planning, Democratic Process, Political Parties, Nigeria.

Evidentiality and Mirativity in Traditional Negev Arabic: Morphological, Lexical and Discourse-Syntactic Strategies

Abstract Evidentiality as a typological category pertains to the source of information from the speaker's point of view without specifying it. This information may be conveyed as non-witnessed, inferred or surprising (mirative), among other possibilities. Evidentiality strategies and mirativity strategies are usually secondary extensions of other primary functions, such as resultativity. These strategies may be grammatical, syntactic or discursive, and I also include here lexical items with no other function. In Traditional Negev Arabic, as spoken by elderly Bedouin in Southern Israel, grammatical evidentiality was noted in 1992. Since then, however, evidentiality in Arabic has only been recognized in some peripheral dialects in contact with evidential languages. This study analyses the interaction and pragmatic-rhetorical effects of three strategies for evidentiality and mirativity in oral narrative texts in Traditional Negev Arabic: a grammatical strategy via the evidential participle; a lexical strategy via evidential particles; and a discourse-syntactic strategy via presentatives, combining visual evidence with mirativity and often inference. These strategies tend to cluster together in narrative peaks, creating saturated environments of high dramatic tension. Their complex interaction is highly effective in focalizing and achieving pragmatic and rhetorical ends in this under-studied and rapidly disappearing oral narrative tradition.

The Expression of Evidentiality in Spoken and Written Texts: Empirical Approaches to Romance Languages

Evidentiality is a grammatical category that encodes information source as its primary meaning. The information can be: acquired through direct perception, reported by others (hearsay) or inferred by the speaker upon considering the information that is available. Languages with an evidential grammatical category have morphemes with a primary evidential value (Aikhenvald 2004). Nevertheless, Romance languages, like many other languages, have a tense- modal system and lack an evidential grammatical category, instead of which several lexical units or certain constructions convey information source. This special issue is devoted to some of those items, such as modal adverbs, evidential meanings developed from tenses such as the conditional, and certain (semi)grammaticalized markers using SAY-verbs and SEE-verbs. These evidential strategies are good examples of the lexical-grammatical continuum (Cornillie 2007b, Squartini 2008, Pietrandrea 2007, Diewald & Smirnova 2010).

Knowledge Management in News Discourse: A Socio-and-Cognitive View

The article considers news discourse as one of the leading genres of the media sphere, of particular concern is the issue of ideologically biased news reports. It focuses on how ideology and knowledge are managed in news discourse production and comprehension. The theoretical perspective of the paper is the critical epistemic discourse analysis proposed by T.A. van Dijk. The paper considers mental representation of the event nominated in British and American mass media as "Russian spy poisoning". The author offers the issue that knowledge may be relative to the members and the criteria of different epistemic communities, and one of the strategies of persuasion is to define beliefs as knowledge of facts. The paper reveals the communicative function and pragmatic potential of epistemic modality and evidentiality in the ideological control of news discourse. It is argued that evidentials do not always come alone but may be part of complex evidential strategies. The author claims that the evidence-epistemic markers with the semantics of knowledge / possibility / probability / likelihood in mental representation of the event "Russian spy poisoning" aim at manipulating and misleading the addressee. The article is an initial step toward analyzing the role of knowledge and beliefs in the formation of mental event models in ideologically based news discourse.

The Expression of Evidentiality in Spoken and Written Texts: Empirical Approaches to Romance Languages

Evidentiality is a grammatical category that encodes information source as its primary meaning. The information can be: acquired through direct perception, reported by others (hearsay) or inferred by the speaker upon considering the information that is available. Languages with an evidential grammatical category have morphemes with a primary evidential value (Aikhenvald 2004). Nevertheless, Romance languages, like many other languages, have a tense- modal system and lack an evidential grammatical category, instead of which several lexical units or certain constructions convey information source. This special issue is devoted to some of those items, such as modal adverbs, evidential meanings developed from tenses such as the conditional, and certain (semi)grammaticalized markers using SAY-verbs and SEE-verbs. These evidential strategies are good examples of the lexical-grammatical continuum (Cornillie 2007b, Squartini 2008, Pietrandrea 2007, Diewald & Smirnova 2010).

Evidential Strategies in Nyamwezi

This paper provides an overview of evidential strategies in Nyamwezi. Nyamwezi, like many other African languages, does not have specific grammatical categories which indicate evidentiality, but evidentiality can be expressed (i) through tense and aspect constructions and (ii) through lexical verbs (particularly verbs of saying and verbs of perception) and epistemic expressions. These evidential strategies differ from each other based on the information source, that is, on the source of knowledge expressed in a proposition, and on the speaker’s attitude and view concerning that knowledge.

Evidentiality and humor in Spanish

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to shed light on the evidentiality functions used by the comedian Andreu Buenafuente during his monologues in Spanish (2007–2011). Firstly, some hypotheses are proposed: (1) genre may determine pragmatic evidentiality functions; (2) evidentials are integrated into a monologue’s expository-argumentative structure; (3) several evidentiality strategies may be distinguished with regard to this structural role; (4) one of these strategies in humorous texts consists of acting as a humorous evidentiality marker. Secondly, reportative evidentials (Willet, 1988;Plungian 2001;Dendale & Tasmowski, 2001, p. 343) such assegún, según dicen, dicen que(‘[they/people]) say’) andse ve que(lit. ‘it is seen that/apparently’), and a direct attested evidential,claro(‘of course’), are analyzed. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses serve as the basis to confirm the hypotheses posed and finally to propose a semantic-pragmatic framework for evidentials and evidentialty in Andreu Buenafuente’s humorous monologues. The corpus comprises 203 printed monologues from the booksSigo diciendo(‘I still say’) (2009),Digo yo(‘So I say’) (2010) andHablar es gratis(‘Speaking is free of charge’) (2011).

THE EXPRESSION OF EVIDENTIALITY IN SPOKEN AND WRITTEN TEXTS: EMPIRICAL APPROACHES TO ROMANCE LANGUAGES

Evidentiality is a grammatical category that encodes information source as its primary meaning. The information can be: acquired through direct perception, reported by others (hearsay) or inferred by the speaker upon considering the information that is available. Languages with an evidential grammatical category have morphemes with a primary evidential value (Aikhenvald 2004). Nevertheless, Romance languages, like many other languages, have a tense- modal system and lack an evidential grammatical category, instead of which several lexical units or certain constructions convey information source. This special issue is devoted to some of those items, such as modal adverbs, evidential meanings developed from tenses such as the conditional, and certain (semi)grammaticalized markers using SAY-verbs and SEE-verbs. These evidential strategies are good examples of the lexical-grammatical continuum (Cornillie 2007b, Squartini 2008, Pietrandrea 2007, Diewald & Smirnova 2010).

On the use of perfect and pluperfect in Estonian dialects

The present paper examines the use of two compound tenses – perfect and pluperfect – in Estonian. Perfect and pluperfect have emerged due to the influence of the Baltic and Germanic languages and are used frequently in Estonian. However, while looking at the usage frequency derived from the Corpus of Estonian Dialects, dialect areas display remarkable differences, which can be explained either by local language contacts with Swedish, Russian, Latvian, and Finnic languages (Votic, Ingrian, and Finnish) or by functional differences in the use of compound tenses. It appears that there are two main regions where the compound tenses are used more often compared to other areas: the Insular dialect and Mulgi dialect regions. The increase of compound tenses in the Insular dialect could be a result of contacts with Swedish. However, the Insular dialect also exhibits a high number of negated utterances using the perfect reflecting changes in the formation of negation more generally in this area. The Mulgi dialect shows a high number of pluperfect forms that can be related to the abundance of reported narratives in the data, but also as an increase of using pluperfect as an evidential strategy, which is probably a result of contacts with Latvian.

Speaker’s stance and subjectivity in the epistemic modal and evidential use of the Spanishimperfectoin journalistic texts

AbstractThis study contributes to the analysis of the epistemic modal and evidential use of the Spanishimperfectowith regard to the speaker’s stance and subjectively (rather than grammatically) motivated decision to use the Spanishimperfectoas an evidential strategy in journalistic texts: The speaker uses the Spanishimperfectoto express or tell a state of affairs from his perspective as a ‘narrator’, implying that he is not the author of such information and referring to third sources without mentioning it. The corpus data were obtained from theCorpus de la Real Academia Española(CREA) from the section ‘written journalistic texts’ of the standard Iberian Spanish to guarantee the authenticity of examples and avoid any case of misunderstanding it as a variety of Spanish.