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17.3: Evidentiality and epistemic modality

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    138720
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    Having examined some examples of the kinds of distinctions that are typically found in evidential systems, let us think about what kind of meaning these grammatical markers express. Aikhenvald (2004: 3), in her very important book on this topic, defines evidentiality as follows:

    Evidentiality is a linguistic category whose primary meaning is source of information… [T]his covers the way in which information was acquired, without necessarily relating to the degree of speaker’s certainty concerning the statement or whether it is true or not… To be considered as an evidential, a morpheme has to have ‘source of information’ as its core meaning; that is, the unmarked, or default interpretation.

    There are several important points to be noted in this definition. First, evidentiality is a grammatical category.5 All languages have lexical means for expressing source of information (I was told that p; I infer that p; apparently; it is said; etc.), but the term evidential is normally restricted to grammatical morphemes (affixes, particles, etc.). Second, an evidential marker must have source of information as its core meaning. This is significant because evidentiality often correlates with other semantic features, such as degree of certainty. Such a correlation is not surprising, since a speaker will naturally feel more certain of things he has seen with his own eyes than things he learned by hearsay. (We return below to the question of how we can know which factor represents the marker’s “core meaning”.)

    It is not unusual for evidential meanings to arise as secondary functions of markers of modality, tense, etc. For example, the German modal verb sollen ‘should’ has a secondary usage as a hearsay marker, as illustrated in (4). This form is often cited in discussions of evidentiality; but under Aikhenvald’s strict definition of the term, it would not be classified as an evidential, because its primary function is to mark modality.6

    (4) Kim soll einen neuen Job angeboten bekommen haben.

    Kim should a new job offered get have

    ‘Kim has supposedly been offered a new job.’ [von Fintel 2006]

    A third claim implicit in Aikhenvald’s definition is that evidentiality is distinct from epistemic modality. She states this explicitly a bit later:

    Evidentials may acquire secondary meanings — of reliability, probability and possibility (known as epistemic extensions), but they do not have to… Evidentiality is a category in its own right, and not a subcategory of any modality… That evidentials may have semantic extensions related to probability and speaker’s evaluation of trustworthiness of information does not make evidentiality a kind of modality. [Aikhenvald 2004: 7–8]

    Epistemic modality of course is the linguistic category whose primary function is to indicate the speaker’s degree of certainty concerning the proposition that is being expressed. As we have just noted, there is a close correlation between source of information and degree of certainty, and a number of authors have classified evidentiality as a kind of modality.7 But Aikhenvald maintains that the two categories need to be distinguished.

    Of course, the question of whether evidentiality is a type of epistemic modality depends in part on how one defines modality; but this is not just a terminological issue. We argued in Chapter 16 that modal markers, including epistemic modals, contribute to the propositional content of an utterance. There is good evidence that evidential markers in a number of languages do not contribute to propositional content but function as illocutionary modifiers, and so must be distinct from epistemic modality. But before we review some of this evidence, it will be helpful to think about how we go about identifying a marker’s “primary function”.


    5 cf. Aikhenvald (2004: 1).

    6 Aikhenvald (2004: 1) estimates that about a quarter of the world’s languages have grammatical markers of evidentiality. In contrast, de Haan (2013) indicates that evidentiality markers are present in 57% of the WALS sample (237 out of 418 languages). But this figure is based on a broader definition of the term: de Haan includes cases like German sollen, where a modal or some other grammatical marker has a secondary evidential function.

    7 Palmer (1986), Frawley (1992), Matthewson et al. (2007), Izvorski (1997).


    This page titled 17.3: Evidentiality and epistemic modality is shared under a CC BY 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Paul Kroeger (Language Library Press) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.