Evidential Types Research Articles

The Category of Evidentiality and the Mechanisms of its Expression in Kartvelian Proverbs

Evidentiality is a universal morphosyntactic category of text that can be expressed by morphological, syntactic and lexical means. However, its linguistic expression is diverse not only in non-related but also in related languages (Margiani, Kurdadze, Lomia 2019: 427). Evidentiality as a universal grammatical category “is directly linked to the semantics of the utterance, expressing the attitude of the speaker to the provided information and pointing to the reliable source (direct or indirect) of information“ (Margiani, Kurdadze, Lomia 2019: 17). The category of evidentiality is expressed on the levels of text and discourse by various means, of which the construction with indirect speech is of utmost importance. Special literature has proved that “indirect speech is historically secondary. It is obtained as a result of processing-transformation of direct speech“ (Kvachadze 1977:441). An empirical analysis has yielded proverbs of simple structure that are expressed by means of subordinate clauses only. Such proverbs are especially productive in the Kartvelian languages. The main clause in such proverbs implies the present and past tense forms of verbs of saying (‘they say’, ‘it is said’, ‘they have said’ and so on). These verbs are omitted due to ellipsis. Such proverbs mention neither a speaker nor an addressee. In such cases, the omitted part (i.e. the main clause) is compensated by particles like Georgian o which indicate indirect speech.Indirect speech particles are distributed among the Kartvelian languages as follows: It should be underlined that in Kartvelian proverbs the indirect speech particles of the 3rd person are used systematically while the particles of the 1st and 2nd persons are extremely rare. This can be explained by the fact that the indirect speech particle of the 3rd person in the Kartvelian proverbs generalises the expressed viewpoint and enhances the reliability of the context.The use of the indirect speech particles in Georgian, Megrelian, Laz and Svan can also be analysed from the viewpoint of evidentiality. As it is known from the scholarly literature, evidentiality is expressed both morphologically and semantically in the Kartvelian languages. Different types of evidentiality are expressed differently on various language levels. For instance, in Georgian, evidentiality is expressed by perfect forms of verbs, by lexical means, by indirect speech markers, by evidential particles, etc. (Topadze-Gäumann 2011). Interestingly enough, in the Kartvelian proverbs evidentiality can have single (morphological or syntactic), double, and even multiple markers. In the latter case, it is simultaneously expressed by indirect speech particles and by evidential tenses. However, it should be noted that the natural structure of Georgian paremiological units is represented by evidential forms with single markers (mostly indirect speech particles).

The evidential meaning of presupposition and implicature between retractability and deniability of information

Abstract The relation evidentiality bears on the coding of some information as presupposition or as implicature is still an underexplored research field. In this paper, such an interplay is addressed by looking into how presupposed and implied contents (differently) respond to contexts of challenge and deniability. As taken for granted information (Stalnaker, Robert. 1973. Presuppositions. Journal of Philosophical Logic 2(4). 447–457), presupposition is more resistant to both challenging and retracting conversational moves, since it conveys content the speaker does not commit to. By contrast, implicature – characterized as intentional meaning (Grice, Herbert P. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Peter Cole & Jerry Morgan (eds.), Syntax and semantics 3: Speech acts, 41–58. New York: Academic Press) – allows both challenging and retracting conversational moves, because it is information the speaker commits to the most, similarly to what happens with plain declarative sentences. Building on this account, it is suggested that the higher challenging and deniability status cued by implicature is related to its function of encoding a direct type of evidentiality (Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2004. Evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press), namely a condition in which the speaker presents herself as the first-hand source of some information. Conversely, the weaker challengeability and deniability associated to presupposition hinges on its property of encoding a mutual type of evidentiality (Hintz, Daniel J. & Hintz Diane M. 2017. The evidential category of mutual knowledge in Quechua. Lingua 186. 88–109), that is, a state in which information is construed and conveyed as already shared by all participants at the moment of utterance.

Implementation of Category of Evidentiality in Analytical Article of English-Language Quality Press

The ways of explication of evidentiality in analytical articles of the English-language press are investigated. 30 articles of newspapers “The Washington Post”, “The Guardian”, “The Independent” for 2021 are analyzed. The classification of evidential values is presented on the basis of two indicators: the source of information and its degree of reliability. Three types of evidentiality have been identified: direct evidentiality (there is a clear indication of the source of information); impersonal evidentiality (lack of an identified source of information); author’s evidentiality (based on the author’s conclusions). The results of the study showed a significant superiority of direct evidentiality (74 %), realized through the precise indication of the source of information and the use of the author’s “we”. It was revealed that impersonal evidentiality is not typical for an analytical article (6 %). This is due to its specific characteristics: the desire for objectivity and transparency of the data provided. It is noted that this type of evidentiality is realized through adverbs, indicating an anonymous source and using collective nouns. It is shown that the author’s evidentiality is found in 20 % of cases and is realized through filler words, main sentences like that means, adverbs, impersonal sentences using verbs of perception, constructions “to be + adjective with a probability value”, modal verbs.

Реализация модусной категории «эвиденциальность» в условиях цифровизации дискурсивного пространства

The article is devoted to the peculiarities of the functioning of the modus category of evidentiality in media discourse in the context of digitalization. The study of evidentiality is motivated by the importance of identification of the information source and the nature of the information communicated. The purpose of this research is to reveal the features of the representation of types of evidentiality in the digital discourse space. The objectives of the article include analysis of the feasibility of taking evidential semantics as a subject matter in the study of news discourse as well as provision of arguments substantiating the predominance of indicators of explicit evidentiality in news discourse in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The material under study includes 1,000 English-language contexts from articles about the pandemic taken from the website of The Economist magazine via the continuous sampling method. The relevance of the research is due to insufficient study of evidentiality from this perspective, as well as the need to study the axiological evidential meanings generated by a communication participant when constructing discourse. The paper defines global digitalization, describes the features of digitalization of the discourse space, and outlines the role of evidentiality in news discourse. The author concludes that it is important to use persuasive evidential means in electronic news media during the COVID-19 pandemic, which makes it possible to describe two types of this category, depending on the communicative intentions of the author / subject of the news passage – explicit and hidden evidentiality. Depending on the characteristics of the communicative situation, the identified indicators of persuasive evidentiality contribute to an additional substantiation of the reliability of the communicated information and make it possible to exert a directed influence on the addressee through persuasion.

‘Tell Us Only What You Know’: Evidentiality in the Discourse of Participants in Spanish Trials

The aim of this proposal is to explore the use of evidentiality in Spanish trials and its relationship with the genre’s conventions and the roles of the participants in these discursive events. To do that, we base our study on a quantitative–qualitative analysis of a transcribed corpus of oral Spanish trials. Evidentiality is a semantic-functional category that includes linguistic devices that mark the source of information behind the speaker’s statements. The explicit marking of the source is not obligatory in Spanish; however, in specific genres (legal, parliamentary, and academic), it becomes a powerful argumentative tool for negotiating the validity of the ideas. We analysed how different participants in the trials made use of evidential expressions. It can be observed that speakers with expert knowledge about the genre conventions (jurists) employed evidentiality differently from the way in which lay participants did. Some differences can be observed at the level of the types of evidentiality. For example, generic inferences and the reporting of laws and scripts are typical of the jurists’ discourse, while lay participants, particularly the witnesses, referred more often to information based on observation. Furthermore, our analysis suggested that jurists were more likely to exploit evidential constructions for argumentative or strategic purposes. For example, logical reasoning based on presumably known or shared information can be used to downgrade the speaker’s commitment or to mitigate and attenuate disagreement.

On the role of person features in the evidential-temporal connection

AbstractThe present article argues that temporality can be computed indirectly via evidentiality, and that this is the case for Paraguayan Guaraní, a tenseless language. To model the evidential–temporal connection, we employ features from the domains of person (author, participant) and general deixis (proximate, distal). We discuss in detail the case of two evidential morphemes: indirect evidentialra'eand reportativeraka'e.We argue that these particles do not have temporal semantics; rather their temporal contribution is due to the interaction of person features that determine the type of evidentiality and deictic features incorporated into the person system.

Verbos de percepción evidenciales en artículos científicos del siglo XIX: funciones pragmático-retóricas

This paper describes the pragmatic-rhetoric functions of visual perception verbs used as evidentials in scientific articles. These verbs not only indicate different types of evidentiality (visual and inferential), but can also adopt forms that suggest the (non)shared status of evidence. Our aim is to discover if there exists any constant relationship between the type of evidentiality, accessibility and the functions these evidential constructions have in the discourse. This study was carried out in a corpus of Biology articles published between 1799 and 1920. We believe that, in this corpus, many evidential choices are conditioned more by the author’s intentions than by the conventions of the genre. It should be reminded that in the period under study the conventions of scientific writing were yet to be established.

From visual perception to inference in the French evidential markersil m’est avis que,apparemment, andil paraît que

AbstractThis article studies the evolution, from Medieval to Modern French, of three evidential markers that are semantically related from a diachronic perspective:il m’est avis que‘I think that’, ‘it seems to me that’,apparemment‘apparently’, andil paraît que‘it seems that, apparently’. This study demonstrates the rise of the modal and evidential uses of the markers in question, from the Medieval period onwards, and provides a semantic characterization of these three epistemic-evidential markers in order to precisely grasp the evolution of their meaning. Using information from a number of databases, this article provides empirical support for the study of the different types of evidentiality, their evolution, and their interaction with the epistemic commitment of the speaker and the degree of certainty. The three markers have evolved towards greater subjectivity and a lower degree of certainty. Their historical semantic description shows that a marker may shift diachronically between various types of evidence.

On the Evidential Status of Presupposition and Assertion

This work tackles the evidential behavior of presuppositions and assertions by assessing their socio-interactional function in communication. It is argued that by asserting and presupposing contents in an utterance, speakers encode a personal experience and a factual type of evidentiality, respectively, the former entailing a stronger involvement of the speaker as committed source of some information. By discussing how evidential meanings can also be pragmatically-inferred, the present paper proposes to recast the presupposition-assertion distinction as a further level of evidentiality marking.

Reporting verb in research projects of EFL English major students

Aim: The present study aimed to investigate 1) which reporting verbs are most frequently used by EFL English major students in their researcher projects, and 2) which group of reporting verbs does most of them use in the research projects.Method: In order to accomplish the purposes of the study, a corpus of 52 research projects written by EFL English major students was selected and investigated. Additionally, this study adopted the categorization of Francis, Huston, and Manning (1996) to classify reporting verbs.Findings: The findings showed that the top five high frequency reporting verbs were “show”, “find”, “present”, “analyse”, and “state”. After classifying the reporting verb groups, the findings also presented that the highest percentage of reporting verb groups of this study were the ARGUE verb group (50%) followed by THINK (18.75%), SHOW (12.5), FIND (12.5%), and ADD verb group (6.25%) respectively.Implications/Novel Contribution: This study intends to help to raise the writers’ awareness in choosing reporting evidential in research project or academic writing. Theoretically, it is a beginning to study what evidentially can do for the language users other than indicating the information source. It may lay a foundation for the future research and provide orientation for further studies. There are more areas to be further studied, for example, the functions of other evidential types, the genre convention, and evidential use in other genres.

Using Evidence in L2 Argumentative Writing: A Longitudinal Case Study Across High School and University

This 8‐year longitudinal case study of Fabiola, a Spanish‐English bilingual, investigated her argumentative writing development, focusing on her use of evidence to support and develop arguments over time from high school through university. Data sources included 36 writing samples. Texts across grade levels and course types were analyzed to determine changes in evidential types (quotations and paraphrases), evidential functions, and reporting verbs used to introduce evidence. Interview transcripts were analyzed to identify Fabiola's changing perspectives on use of evidence in argumentative writing. Evidentials were found to vary according to course type, but more dramatic changes (in type, function, and range of reporting verbs used) were found over time as language proficiency and writing expertise developed, providing longitudinal support for other studies that have examined writers at only one point in time.

Evidentiality and illative markers in Spanish

This study investigates the presence of evidentiality in the Spanish language, which lacks morphological affixes and, therefore, does not possess specialized forms for evidential meaning. In particular, I examine the requirements for appropriate interpretation and the type of evidentiality possessed by consecutive markers, such as así que, conque, and de manera/modo que, when they head a sentence and do not express a relation of result with any immediately prior discourse. I review some typical examples and provide evidence regarding the scope of negation and interrogation in relation to evidentiality. I also explore the effects of surprise, irony and displeasure – issues that have previously been examined by other researchers – in order to argue for the evidential nature of these structures in Spanish.

Tensed evidentials: A typological study

AbstractTo gain more insight into evidentiality, the grammatical marking of information source, it is worth studying the category in its relation to other grammatical categories. This study explores tensed evidentials, morphemes in which tense and evidentiality are fused, in 36 languages from four macro-areas (North America, South America, Eurasia, and Papunesia). The study reveals several interactions between tense values and evidential values. As opposed to what has been claimed, firsthand future evidentials seem to exist. Visual and non-visual evidentials occur equally with present and past, whereas mental activity evidentials and reportative evidentials are much more limited to the past. These findings conform to the logic of tense: every type of evidentiality can be gathered in the past, whereas some are less suited for present or future. As a result, we find exceptionless implicational hierarchies of the form

Four types of evidentiality in the native languages of Brazil

AbstractIn this paper we argue that the notions generally grouped together under the heading of evidentiality actually belong to four different evidential subcategories, which are different from one another in terms of their semantic scope. The hierarchical, scopal architecture of Functional Discourse Grammar is used to define these four categories. After giving our arguments for this new classification, we test a number of predictions that follow from it concerning the coexistence of evidential subcategories within a language and the co-occurrence of evidential markers in a single clause. We investigate our predictions in a sample of 64 native languages of Brazil. The data from these languages show that the presence of one or more of the four evidential subcategories can be systematically described in terms of an implicational hierarchy.

A Cross-Disciplinary Study of Evidentiality in Abstracts of English Research Articles

This paper is a cross-disciplinary study of evidentiality in English abstracts. The corpus consists of 200 abstracts of English RAs of four disciplines: linguistics, philosophy, computer and electronics. Firstly, our study presents the lexicogrammatical realizations of evidentiality in English abstracts of four disciplines, and then it compares the cross-disciplinary use of evidentiality from the analyses of reporting evidentials and modal verbs in inferring evidentials. The analyses show significant differences in the distribution and frequency of four evidential types in abstracts of the four disciplines and also show that different disciplinary conventions of writers may influence their choice of evidentiality in their abstracts writing. It is hoped that this study may be helpful to enrich the study of evidentiality in academic discourses. Besides, it may give implications on the learning and teaching of academic writing.

Intersubjective evidentials in Yurakaré

This paper argues that evidentials in Yurakaré (Bolivia, isolate) have an intersubjective dimension in that they do not only express the speaker’s information source, but also convey the speaker’s assumptions about the addressee’s perspective on the information. To describe these intersubjective evidentials, an analysis is proposed in terms of a relation between speaker and addressee and two propositions, the expressed proposition and the proposition which constitutes evidence for it. Evidence from conversational data is presented to support the intersubjective analysis of the Yurakaré evidentials. Comparing Yurakaré to two other languages, South Conchucos Quechua (Hintz 2007) and Southeastern Tepehuan (Willett 1991), it is suggested that there are at least two types of intersubjective evidentials. Evidentials of the first type have different forms contrasting in terms of intersubjectivity within evidential types (South Conchucos Quechua, Southeastern Tepehuan), while those of the second type have specific intersubjective components without such a contrast (Yurakaré).

Evidentiality in English Research Articles of Applied Linguistics: From the Perspective of Metadiscourse

This paper investigates, from the metadiscourse perspective, the linguistic phenomenon of evidentiality in English Research Articles (RAs) of applied linguistics. Based on a corpus of 100 RAs, the study first presents its own classification of evidentiality and their specific lexicogrammatical realizations. Then, following Hyland’s metadiscourse model (2005), it examines in detail how different evidential types and linguistic realizations can function as various metadiscourse devices and what roles they can play in the construction and attainment of persuation. The study has shown the multiple metadiscourse functions of evidentiality. It provides a new perspective to understand evidentiality.

Some remarks on reported evidentiality in French and in Estonian: a contrastive approach

Among the multiple meanings of the French conditional, the marking of mediated information is generally pointed out in the studies treating this mood in French. In Estonian there is a specialized grammatical(ized) form for marking reported evidentiality – the quotative mood. Our paper aims to study the contrast between the use of evidentiality strategies in French and Estonian. The analysis will be based on a translated parallel corpus and on different types of texts and studies of monolingual corpora of both languages. In typological studies the French conditional and the Estonian grammatical evidentials are considered as belonging to the same type of evidentiality, that of reported information (Aikhenvald 2006). However, it appears that they tend to be used in different types of discourse. This observation has served as a starting point for our study: the aim of our contrastive analysis is to find out whether these divergences are confirmed by translated texts, whether they also reveal semantic differences between these evidentiality markers, and which strategies are used in the translations in both directions.

On the accusative with participle: Typological and cognitive aspects

This paper deals with the the complements of the verbs of visual and auditory perception in Old Church Slavonic: Accusative with participle (AP) and clause. The two types of complements are semantically differentiated by evidentiality: AP serves for the firsthand evidentiality and the clause for the non-firsthand evidentiality. Since AP is attested in Old Russian, Old Czech as well in some other old Slavonic languages, it is evident that it was an indigenous Slavic construction. It belongs to the Indo-European syntactic inheritance - the appositive double accusative. Since in early Indo-European the accusative was a general adverbial case, it expressed both types of evidentiality. With the typological drift of Indo-European and its daughter languages toward a nominative language type, which meant the development of syntactic transitivity, the AP was reanalyzed as an object, but only in the cases of the firsthand evidentiality (where the subject has control over the information). For non-firsthand evidentiality, another strategy, inherited also from the proto-language, was used: a sentence with delimitative connective(s). This process was finished by the end of Proto-Slavonic, as testified by Old Church Slavonic. In the process of the further strengthening of transitivity, which gave a prominent role to the predicate as the centripetal core of the sentence, the other predicative center - the active participle - had to be removed, while the passive participle was reanalyzed as an adjective. This led to the loss of the AP in the early history of Slavic languages and the development of hypotactic structures. It was a long process, marked by the competition of different particles and deictic forms which were on the way to be grammaticalized into conjunctions. It ended with the formation of the two types of conjunctions for the two types of evidentiality, e.g. jak - ze in Czech, da - ce in Bulgarian, kako - da in Serbian, kak - cto in Russian etc. This shows not only the importance of evidentiality in a diachronic perspective but also that its formalization is based on the language type.

Evidential Types: Evidence from Cree Dialects

Evidentials, which introduce the speaker’s perspective regarding information being presented, can be divided into at least two classes in Cree: CP‐external (with illocutionary force) and IP‐external (with temporal or modal force). Cree dialects differ in their deployment of evidentials. CP‐external evidentials include quotative verbs (attested in all Cree dialects) and reportative particles (in Plains Cree). IP‐external evidentials include dubitative particles (in Plains Cree) as well as affixal indirect evidentials that are temporally conditioned (in Cree/Montagnais/Naskapi). The proposed analysis of evidential types in Cree dialects lends support to the Evidential Domain Hypothesis (Blain and Dechaine 2006) that claims that evidentials differ from each other according to the syntactic domain in which they are introduced.