Eliciting and Documenting Evidentiality (2015)

Quaestiones Disputatae, 2020

Despite the extensive search that has been done on the phenomenon of evidentiality in the discourse, i.e. the coding of the information source, there are still terminological and conceptual discrepancies that need to be laid out. The present paper presents a theoretical framework of evidentiality. It starts with an examination of the scope of evidentiality in terms of grammar and semantics, ending up with a full understanding of the notion as a functional-conceptual domain. The discussion also focuses on the relationship between evidentiality and epistemic modality since this is still an open-ended issue in the field. We support that a thorough study of particular evidential forms, such as reportative evidential, would be needed as a vibrant continuation of this theoretical revision

Human cognitive processing, 2018

Diverging subdivisions and some additional types of evidentiality have been suggested, in line with the distinctions that specific languages make. For example, inferential and assumed evidentiality can be distinguished, since inferences can be based on general or stored knowledge about the subject's habits, i.e. indirect evidence, or on perceptual, especially visual (i.e., direct) evidence (cf. Hengeveld and Dall'Aglio Hattnher 2015). Aikhenvald (2004: 2-3) argues that the difference between assumed and inferred evidentiality lies in the access to visual evidence in the case of the latter. An inferential evidential is "based on obvious evidence which can be easily observed (even if the event itself was not seen)" (Aikhenvald 2004: 3). Also, she notes a difference in the degree of reasoning involved. That is to say, "the more the speaker has to rely on reasoning based on knowledge or on common sense, the more chance there is that the assumed evidential will be used" (Aikhenvald 2004: 3). Müller (2013: 212) notes that inferential evidentiality can be distinguished from direct visual evidentiality because in the case of inferential evidentiality the event itself is not directly witnessed. Thus, in English, when a speaker finds John's wife's body, an inferential evidential expression can be used, such as John must have killed his wife. Also, the speaker may actually see the result of an event, and utter I see that John cleaned up the place. In this case I see is not an expression of direct but of indirect evidence, as it is the result of the event that is witnessed, but not the event itself. Gipper (this volume) argues that Yurakaré-shi has in fact properties of both direct and indirect evidentiality, whereas Zeisler (this volume) argues that the notion of 'direct' knowledge for immediately observed facts is not exactly applicable to the Tibetic marker ḥdug, for which reason she prefers to qualify it as 'weakly indirect'. Bergqvist (this volume) stresses the importance of access to the evidence. As he points out, not only the speaker's access plays a role in the meaning of evidentials, the hearer's access can play a role as well. In this view on evidentiality, notions such as 'subjectivity', 'intersubjectivity' and 'perspective' come into the picture in a natural way. Although some renowned specialists in the field have argued that only obligatory grammatical markers of evidentiality fall into the category of evidentiality in language (e.g., Aikhenvald 2004), many linguists nowadays take a broader perspective and also take lexical expressions into account. We concur with Marín Arrese's (2015: 212) assessment that "if we restrict the notion of evidentiality to cases of obligatory grammatical marking, we miss out on the expression of evidentiality in a significant number of languages, and we fail to adequately characterize and delimit the conceptual domain of evidentiality". The aim of the present volume is to provide empirical evidence for the existence of evidentiality across the board: not just in a subset of languages, but presumably in all languages; not just in specific grammatical markers or designated lexical expressions, but also in grammatical categories that do not have the expression of evidentiality as their primary function,

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2018

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, along...

Oxford Handbooks Online

Every language has a way of saying how one knows what one is talking about, and what one thinks about what one knows. In some languages, one always has to specify the information source on which it is based—whether the speaker saw the event, or heard it, or inferred it based on something seen or on common sense, or was told about it by someone else. This is the essence of evidentiality, or grammatical marking of information source—an exciting category loved by linguists, journalists, and the general public. This volume provides a state-of-the art view of evidentiality in its various guises, their role in cognition and discourse, child language acquisition, language contact, and language history, with a specific focus on languages which have grammatical evidentials, including numerous languages from North and South America, Eurasia and the Pacific, and also Japanese, Korean, and signed languages.

Intercultural Pragmatics, 2014

This chapter deals with the relation between the notional domains of information source and epistemic modality. It surveys various approaches to this relation and the crosslinguistic patterns of the way in which linguistic units (of diverse formats) with evidential or epistemic meanings develop extensions whereby they encroach into each other’s domains. Meaning extensions in either direction can adequately be captured, and confusion between both domains can be avoided, only if in the analysis of the meaning of such units (a) an onomasiological and semasiological perspective and (b) a coded-inferred divide are distinguished. Thus, epistemic extensions often arise as Generalized Conversational Implicatures (GCIs). Concomitantly, reliability functions as a mechanism that mediates between, but cannot be identified with, the contributions of evidential and epistemic meanings. Reliability, together with the predictability of specific markers and discourse expectations, is considered responsible for the rise of epistemic GCIs.

2016

Epistemic modals are uncontroversially assumed to have an inherent evidential component of NON-DIRECT evidence (von Fintel and Gillies 2010, a.o.). This assumption entails the following: (i) epistemic modals should be infelicitous in evidence-neutral contexts, (ii) and they should be infelicitous in contexts with DIRECT perceptual evidence (including trustworthy reports). This paper will engage with the first prediction, and provide empirical basis for the claim that epistemic modals can and do appear in certain neutral contexts cross-linguistically. An analysis is provided centered around the epistemic modal base, where an additional ordering source is shown to yield non-evidential readings of epistemic modals, thus arguing that discourse goals can affect formal representations of modality.