Towards a new approach to evidentiality : issues and directions for research
Evidentiality is often defined as the grammatical means of expressing information source. This paper argues for a broader definition of evidentials, as close work documenting languages has shown that simply saying evidentials mark source of information does not capture all of the actual uses of ev...
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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2021
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/10356/145731 |
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| Institution: | Nanyang Technological University |
| Language: | English |
| Summary: | Evidentiality is often defined as the grammatical means of expressing information source. This paper argues for a broader definition of evidentials, as close
work documenting languages has shown that simply saying evidentials mark
source of information does not capture all of the actual uses of evidential marking. The paper discusses other aspects that need to be taken account of in any
full discussion of the use of evidential marking, in particular the speaker’s access
to information (not just source), plus the subjective strategy or perspective of the
speaker in representing a particular state of affairs. The notion of ‘source’ in this
paper is used in a restricted sense to mean primarily a verbal source of information (reported information) and is distinguished from ‘access’, which refers to the
non-verbal access to information (sensory, inferential, etc., including the sensory
access to verbal source) available to the speaker, though marking of source and
access may appear together. Given this distinction the paper proposes a new
definition of evidential marking: the representation of source and access to
information according to the speaker’s perspective and strategy. |
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