17.1: Markers that indicate the speaker’s source of information

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The Tagalog particle daw ~ raw is used to indicate that the speaker heard the information being communicated from someone else, as illustrated in example (1). ‘Hearsay’ markers like this are one of the most common types of evidential marker among the world’s languages.

(1) Mabuti raw ang=ani.

good hearsay nom=harvest

‘They say that the harvest is good.’ [Schachter & Otanes 1972: 423]

The term evidential refers to a grammatical marker which indicates the speaker’s source of information. Evidentials have often been treated as a type of epistemic modality, but in this chapter we will argue that the two categories are distinct. We begin in §17.2 with a brief survey of some common types of evidential systems found across languages. In §17.3 we present a more careful definition of the term evidential and discuss the distinction between evidentiality and epistemic modality. In §17.4 we discuss some of the ways in which we can distinguish evidentiality from other categories, such as tense or modality, which may tend to correlate with evidentiality. §17.5 reviews a proposed distinction between two types of evidential marking. In some languages evidential markers seem to function as illocutionary (speech act) modifiers, while in other languages evidential markers seem to contribute to the propositional content of the utterance. In terms of the distinction we made in Chapter 11, the former type can be identified as contributing use-conditional meaning, while the latter can be identified as contributing truth-conditional meaning.