Evidence For Evidentiality

In some languages every statement must contain a specification of the type of evidence on which it is based: for example, whether the speaker saw it, or heard it, or inferred it from indirect evidence, or learnt it from someone else. This grammatical reference to information source is called 'evidentiality', and is one of the least described grammatical categories. Evidentiality systems differ in how complex they are: some distinguish just two terms (eyewitness and noneyewitness, or reported and everything else), while others have six or even more terms. Evidentiality is a category in its own right, and not a subcategory of epistemic or some other modality, nor of tense-aspect. Every language has some way of referring to the source of information, but not every language has grammatical evidentiality. In English expressions such as I guess, they say, I hear that, the alleged are not obligatory and do not constitute a grammatical system. Similar expressions in other languages may provide historical sources for evidentials. True evidentials, by contrast, form a grammatical system. In the North Arawak language Tariana an expression such as "the dog bit the man" must be augmented by a grammatical suffix indicating whether the event was seen, or heard, or assumed, or reported. This book provides the first exhaustive cross-linguistic typological study of how languages deal with the marking of information source. Examples are drawn from over 500 languages from all over the world, several of them based on the author's original fieldwork. Professor Aikhenvald also considers the role evidentiality plays in human cognition, and the ways in which evidentiality influences human perception of the world.. This is an important book on an intriguing subject. It will interest anthropologists, cognitive psychologists and philosophers, as well as linguists.

Statements are always under the threat of the potential counter-question How do you know? To pre-empt this question, language users often indicate what kind of access they had to the communicated content: Their own perception, inference from other information, ‘hearsay’, etc. Such expressions, grammatical or lexical, have been studied in recent years under the cover term of evidentiality research. The present volume contributes 11 new studies to this flourishing field, all exploring evidential phenomena in a range of languages (Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Khalkha Mongolian, Spanish, Tibetan, Yurakaré), using a variety of methodologies. Evidential meaning is discussed in relation to other semantic dimensions, such as epistemic modality, semantic roles, commitment, quotative meaning, and tense. The volume is of interest to scholars and students who are interested in up-to-date methods and frameworks for studying evidential meaning and the various ways it is expressed in the languages of the world.

The first volume to offer a thorough and systematic account of evidentiality and the expression of information source, Illustrated with extensive data from a range of typologically diverse languages, Introductory chapter offers practical advice for fieldworkers investigating evidentially, Interdisciplinary in nature with insights from typology, semantics, pragmatics, language description, anthropology, cognitive psychology, and psycholinguistics Book jacket.

Evidentials and Modals offers an in-depth account of the meaning of grammatical elements related to evidentiality and modality, focusing on both theoretical and typological perspectives, ranging from Korean, Japanese, American Indian, Turkish and African languages.

This book uses Sperber and Wilson s Relevance Theory to show how evidential expressions can be analysed in a unified semantic/pragmatic framework. The first part surveys general linguistic work on evidentials, presents speech-act theory and examines Grice s theory of meaning and communication with emphasis on three main issues: for linguistically encoded evidentials, are they truth-conditional or non-truth-conditional, and do they contribute to explicit or implicit communication? For pragmatically inferred evidentials, is there a pragmatic framework in which they can be adequately accounted for? The second part examines those assumptions of Relevance theory that bear on the study of evidentials, offers an account of pragmatically inferred evidentials and introduces three distinctions relevant to the issues discussed in this book: between explicit and implicit communication, truth-conditional and non-truth-conditional meaning, and conceptual and procedural meaning. These distinctions are applied to a variety of linguistically encoded evidentials, including sentence adverbials, parenthetical constructions and hearsay particles. This book offers convincing evidence that not all evidentials behave similarly with respect to the above distinctions and offers an explanation for why this is so.

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In some languages every statement must contain a specification of the type of evidence on which it is based: for example, whether the speaker saw it, or heard it, or inferred it from indirect evidence, or learnt it from someone else. This grammatical reference to information source is called 'evidentiality', and is one of the least described grammatical categories. Evidentiality systems differ in how complex they are: some distinguish just two terms (eyewitness and noneyewitness, or reported and everything else), while others have six or even more terms. Evidentiality is a category in its own right, and not a subcategory of epistemic or some other modality, nor of tense-aspect. Every language has some way of referring to the source of information, but not every language has grammatical evidentiality. In English expressions such as I guess, they say, I hear that, the alleged are not obligatory and do not constitute a grammatical system. Similar expressions in other languages may provide historical sources for evidentials. True evidentials, by contrast, form a grammatical system. In the North Arawak language Tariana an expression such as "the dog bit the man" must be augmented by a grammatical suffix indicating whether the event was seen, or heard, or assumed, or reported. This book provides the first exhaustive cross-linguistic typological study of how languages deal with the marking of information source. Examples are drawn from over 500 languages from all over the world, several of them based on the author's original fieldwork. Professor Aikhenvald also considers the role evidentiality plays in human cognition, and the ways in which evidentiality influences human perception of the world.. This is an important book on an intriguing subject. It will interest anthropologists, cognitive psychologists and philosophers, as well as linguists.

Evidentiality in communication is better investigated in delimited and recognizable contexts where the multiple levels of meaning in interactional practices are manifested. Taking this viewpoint, the present volume explores the interrelations between evidentials and textual genre in Spanish. Adopting a discursive perspective, all of the chapters examine how the functional category of evidentiality is brought into discourse, which set of linguistic strategies evidentiality makes explicit, what counts as evidence in certain contexts and in certain textual genres, and what particular pragmatic meanings these mechanisms acquire, invoke and project onto the on-going discourse. In particular, this book is concerned with the relationship between evidential expressions and the pragmatic meaning(s) triggered by those expressions, and the role of genre in shaping the evidential meanings. The volume is addressed to both theoretically and empirically minded scholars in the disciplines of Pragmatics, Discourse Analysis, Sociolinguistics, Communication Studies, and Psychology.