Evidentiality

Seppo Kittilä
Table of contents

As a linguistic category, evidentiality refers to the linguistic coding of the information source a speaker has for his or her statements. In other words, evidentiality refers to the linguistic coding of what we know and how/why (see, e.g., Aikhenvald 2004: 1, for a more detailed discussion of the term; cf. Boye 2018). Our statements may be, e.g., based on visual evidence, or we may only have hearsay evidence for a given claim. Evidentiality can be viewed as both a semantic and a formal category. Semantically, evidentiality can be considered a universal category in that all languages can take account of a speaker’s information source somehow, for example, lexical verbs such as ‘see’ and ‘hear’ can be used for this in case the language lacks evidentiality as a grammatical category. Other languages, such as Wutun and Tsafiki (see (4) and (5)), in turn, express evidentiality by grammaticalized morphemes, e.g., verbal affixes. In languages where evidentiality is expressed by, e.g., lexical verbs, evidentiality is usually optional, while languages like Wutun express evidentiality obligatorily. Most of the earlier research on evidentiality has focused on languages with grammaticalized evidentiality (see, e.g., Chafe & Nichols 1986; Aikhenvald & Dixon 2003), but recently, there has been a shift in focus, and more research has been done on languages such as German, Spanish and English (see, e.g., Diewald & Smirnova 2010a, 2010b). We may thus say that evidentiality is nowadays viewed more from a semantic/functional perspective and the exact nature of the expression of evidentiality is less relevant. This view is adopted also in this chapter, and no major distinctions are made between languages on the basis of the nature of their evidentiality expression; the goal of this chapter is to discuss evidentiality as broadly as possible.

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