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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Semantics (meaning)
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Evidentiality (Hardcover)
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Evidentiality (Hardcover)
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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.
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