Year: 2020
Type: review
Abstract: Evidential constructions have two main semantic effects: They contribute information about an individual's source of evidence, and they potentially modify the force of a sentence. In this article, I review the at-issue status of the evidential information, the indexical and anaphoric properties of evidentials, their force-modifying effect, and the connection throughout to epistemic modality. In some languages, evidentials occur as part of the grammatical morphology, but evidential information can be expressed through a variety of constructions across languages. As such, the study of evidentiality highlights the important role of cross-linguistic semantics and the collaboration between language typology and linguistic semantics.
Source: Annual Review of Linguistics
Author: Sarah E. Murray
Institution: Cornell University
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W3094497894