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Article published In:
Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area
Vol. 38:1 (2015) ► pp.3–25

Evidentiality and epistemic modality in Zhuang

| University of Melbourne

This paper discusses evidentiality and epistemic modality in Zhuang, a Tai language spoken in South China’s Guangxi Province and surrounding regions. A set of verbs of SPEAKING are found in Zhuang that describe the sources of information. These typically involve the grammaticalised marker nau⁴ which derives from a lexical verb meaning ‘say’, forming a rich array of expressions to mark direct and indirect speech, hearsay and other types of reported information, which carry a wide variety of evidential and epistemic overtones such as surprise, self-correction, mirativity, uncertainty, among others. A number of sentence-final particles, along with hedges and sensory verbs, are also found with these functions. Each of these conveys different degrees of reliability of the source of information.

Keywords: evidentiality, Zhuang, Tai-Kadai, epistemic modality, reported speech, grammaticalisation
Published online: 10 July 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ltba.38.1.01luo
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