Evidentials and Person

This chapter presents an overview of salient issues regarding the correlation between evidentiality and person. A synthesis of research findings is provided and illustrated by empirical data. The person category relevant for evidentiality is shown to be the ‘speaking person’, which translates into various grammatical persons depending on the grammatical construction. The person-sensitive distribution of evidential forms is attributable to features like control, observability, and access to knowledge, and may be creatively manipulated along an evidential directness cline, such that an evidential value reserved for the speaking person may be employed to assert intimate knowledge about another person, and conversely, a reduced evidential value may be selected in self-reports to tone down first-person involvement, exhibiting ‘first-person effects’. Also elucidated herein is how the addressee’s perspective, another critical person factor in evidentiality, shapes evidential formation and selection.

Non-Propositional Evidentiality

This chapter deals with non-propositional evidentiality, i.e. evidential-like distinctions on markers whose scope is limited to a noun phrase. First, it presents the different types of non-propositional evidential markers, the most common of which are demonstrative pronouns and determiners. Second, it shows how non-propositional evidential markers can encode morphosyntactic parameters such as case or topicality in addition to evidentiality. Then, it describes attested non-propositional evidential categories, focusing on sensory (visual, auditory, non-visual) evidentials, as non-sensory non-propositional evidentials are extremely rare. Finally, it discusses how non-propositional evidentiality and nominal tense can interact in some languages and presents some general observations on commonalities and differences between propositional and non-propositional evidential systems.

Evidentiality

This chapter sets out semantic and analytic parameters for understanding evidentials—closed grammatical sets whose main meaning is information source. A noun phrase may have its own evidentiality specification, different from that of a verb. Other means of expressing information source offer open-ended options in terms of their semantics, and can be more flexible in their scope. Evidentiality is distinct from tense, aspect, modality, mirativity, and egophoricity. An evidential can be questioned or be within the scope of negation. The concept of evidentiality is different from the lay person’s notion of ‘evidence’. Evidentiality involves numerous semantic parameters and cannot be reduced to a simplistic ‘direct’ versus ‘indirect’ opposition. Evidentiality needs to be worked out inductively, based on painstaking work with primary materials on a language, rather than on translation and elicitation. Guidelines for fieldworkers investigating evidentials are offered in the Appendix, alongside a glossary of terms.

Evidentiality and Epistemic Modality in Gitksan

This chapter presents a sketch of the grammatical evidential system and related epistemic meanings in Gitksan, a critically endangered indigenous language of the Tsimshianic language family spoken in the northwest interior of Canada. A number of basic syntactic and semantic tests utilizing presupposition, negation, and dissent are applied that provide a nuanced description of the meanings of the individual evidentials. A specific feature of the Gitksan evidentials which is examined in detail involves how they can be used to express epistemic modality, and how a speaker’s choice of which evidential to use in a particular speech context is conditioned by her evaluation of the information acquired in that context. One of the effects of this choice is the expression of what can be translated as modal force.

Evidence and Evidentiality in Quechua Narrative Discourse

This chapter discusses the working of evidentiality in Quechua narrative performance from the central highlands of Peru. In the Quechua narratives analysed, the grammatical marking of source and status of knowledge, and discursive ways of expressing evidence for knowing what is known, are shown to vary strikingly according to performance related factors. On the one hand, narrators base discursively expressed evidence for knowledge, and the veracity and authenticity of the stories they tell, on lived experience. On the other hand, in Huamalíes Quechua the assertion of knowledge and affirmation of validity are grammatically marked by evidential, epistemic modality, and tense suffixes. Taken together, the performative dimensions of discursively expressed evidence, and grammatical choices around evidentiality, constitute the epistemological underpinning of stories about the past in Huamalíes Quechua; both are taken into account in the mixed methods approach to the analysis of Quechua narrative adopted here.

Evidentiality in Bodic Languages

The Bodic group of Tibeto-Burman languages infamously code a wide range of epistemological categories, including evidentiality (source of knowledge) and perhaps more contentiously mirativity (expectations of knowledge), and egophoricity (access to knowledge). This chapter investigates these interrelated related epistemological categories in a range of Bodic languages, including but not limited to Darma (Himalayish; Uttarkhand, India), Manange (Tamangic; Nepal), Magar and Kham (Magaric; Nepal), Newaric (Nepal), various Tibetic languages, and Kurtöp (East Bodish; Bhutan). Mirativity appears to be widely found throughout the region, followed by egophoricity and evidentiality. In terms of evidentiality itself, Bodic languages commonly encode oral source of knowledge and less commonly encode indirect source of knowledge. Despite the close cognitive relationship between evidentiality, mirativity, and egophoricity, Bodic languages demonstrate that these categories are distinct.

Evidentiality in Tibetic

This chapter describes the evidential and related catetgories of Tibetic languages, concentrating on the Lhasa variety. Tibetic languages show an unusual evidential system based on a three-way grammatical distinction among Factual or assumed knowledge, Egophoric or personal knowledge, and Evidential or contingent facts. Evidentiality per se, specifically the distinction between directly and indirectly acquired knowledge, is distinguished only for propositions of the third type. Some Tibetic languages such as Lhasa and Standard Tibetan further subdivide the Egophoric category and distinguish volitional and non-volitional Egophoric forms. All of these categories are matters of presentation, not objective fact; that is, a particular grammatical construction is chosen not in automatic response to an objective situation, but in order to convey a proposition to the addressee in a particular perspective.

Evidentiality and the Expression of Knowledge: An African Perspective

Evidentials in African languages range from systems that distinguish between firsthand and non-firsthand information to repertoires of evidential markers that express source of information, control over knowledge, reliability of inferred information, etc. Besides more ‘typical’ evidentials, there are also examples where evidential meanings are expressed via spatial deictic markers, discourse markers, and pronominal elements. This contribution provides an overview of evidentiality in a number of African languages and a case study of the pragmatics of these expressions. The chapter’s main argument is that evidential meanings can emerge ad hoc in specific sociolinguistic settings, where a number of factors translate into a need for clarity and unambiguity in phatic communication. To avoid misinterpretations, speakers make use of evidential markers, thereby reacting to social pressure. They also make reference to notions of agency, voice, and control over knowledge. This chapter focuses on individual languages of Nigeria (Jukun, Maaka) and South Sudan (Luwo).

Evidentiality and Its Relations With Other Verbal Categories

This chapter focuses on languages that mark evidentiality within the verbal complex. It provides an overview of the interrelations between evidentiality and other categories expressed on verbs. The categories investigated are tense, aspect, modality, polarity, person agreement, mood/speech act type, finiteness, Aktionsart/semantically defined verb classes, and mirativity. Languages worldwide exhibit many peculiarities both with respect to the semantic as well as the formal relations between these categories and evidentiality. Furthermore, the relationships are multivaried and often include more than two categories, which leads to even more intricate interactions. Therefore, it is often impossible to arrive at cross-linguistically valid generalizations, especially with respect to the categories aspect, finiteness, and also tense.

Evidentials in Uralic Languages

This chapter gives an overview of Uralic evidential systems: of the type A3 in Finnic, A2 in Mari and Permic, A1 and A2 in Ob-Ugric (with strong mirativization), of B3, C3, and higher types in Samoyedic, i.e. very different in different branches of the Uralic family. Due to this and to similarities in both semantic values and coding with their geographical neighbours, grammatical evidentiality cannot be considered an inherited feature of Uralic languages—but rather appeared due to areal diffusion and independent innovations with different sources, from past tenses to desubordination.Uralic evidentials are not used in commands and tend to be incompatible with non-indicative moods; they are rarely found in negative clauses and questions, in which case they are outside the scope of the negative/interrogative operator; i.e. the content of the clause is negated/questioned, not the information source.