Филологические науки/7. Язык, речь, речевая коммуникация

Ann Kosenko

Yuri Fedkovych Chernivtsi National University

Evidentiality and epistemic modality

Evidentiality is a deictic category, not a modal one. The basic meaning is to mark the relation between the speaker and the action she/he is describing. Evidentiality thus fulfills the same function for marking relationships between speakers and actions/events that, say, demonstratives do for marking relationships between speakers and objects. Evidentiality is not a priori concerned with the modal aspects of the proposition although it must be stressed that (epistemic) modality may enter the picture at some point. Anyone listening to linguistic information containing evidentials is free to interpret that information however they wish but that does not make modality part of the basic meaning of evidentiality. Rather the situation is similar to the past tense in English, which can have modal interpretations but that does not mean that modality is part of the basic meaning of the Past tense in English.

Evidentiality is traditionally divided in two main categories: direct evidentiality, which shows that the speaker has directly witnessed the action, and indirect evidentiality, which shows that the speaker has no direct evidence for his/her statement, but has other sources for making the statement. Typical direct evidential categories are visual and auditory evidence, stating that the speaker has respectively seen and heard the action.

Indirect evidentials can be inferentials, which mean that the speaker has inferred the action from available evidence, and quotatives (also referred to in the literature as reportative or hearsay evidentiality), which states that the speaker knows about the event from being told by another person. It is not unusual to think of these two categories as representing different degrees of commitment to the truth of the action: indirect evidentials show that the speaker is not as committed to the truth of what she/he is saying than when a direct evidential is used. This view may be correct in some cases, but this is not the reason why evidentials are employed. They are used to denote the relative distance between the speaker and the action. A speaker will use an indirect evidential to state that the action takes/took place outside the speaker’s deictic sphere, whereas the use of a direct evidential shows that the action takes or took place within that deictic sphere.

The relationship between epistemic modality and evidentiality seems obvious, especially when looked at from the perspective of English. A typical view is Palmer who divides epistemic modality into judgments, speculation about the action described, and evidentials, assessment based on some type of evidence. From that perspective it is indeed not hard to conclude that there is a link between the two categories. In English must, for instance, both interpretations appear to be present, since strong epistemic must

is indeed used to make an assessment that an action took place based on some type of evidence. A more limited approach is taken by Van der Auwera and Plungian who only admit inferentiality as a modal category, but not the others.

De Haan argues that there is no good reason to consider evidentiality a part of epistemic modality or even to consider them to be interchangeable terms. Evidentiality asserts the evidence, while epistemic modality evaluates the evidence.

Anderson and Keenan in their article on deictic marking following standard usage, consider as deictic expressions (or deictics for short) those linguistic elements whose interpretation in simple sentences makes essential reference to properties of the extralinguistic context of the utterance in which they occur. Although Anderson and Keenan do not discuss evidentiality, this definition covers evidential usage very well. Their usage makes crucial reference to the extralinguistic context. For instance, an auditory evidential can only be used in those situations in which the speaker has heard the action or event he/she is describing. This also implies that that action or event is capable of making sounds. Each individual evidential category has similar extralinguistic roperties. As with deictic expressions like demonstratives, evidentials have as deictic center the speaker of the utterance. The speaker and its grammatical correlate first person singular, therefore has special properties in evidential systems.

As the presumed deictic center of evidentiality, first person singular occupies a special position in evidential paradigms. There is an apparent incompatibility between indirect evidentiality and first person subjects. The reason is of course that it is very hard to have only indirect evidence for actions in which the speaker himself was the main participant.

Bibliography:

1. Anderson, Stephen R.; Edward L. Keenan. 1985. “Deixis”. In: Timothy Shopen (ed.), language typology and Syntactic description Vol. III, Grammatical categories and the lexicon, 259-308. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2. De Haan, Ferdinand. 1999. “Evidentiality and Epistemic Modality: Setting Boundaries”. Southwest Journal of Linguistics 18.

3. Palmer, Frank R. 2001. Mood and Modality, second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

4. Van der Auwera, Johan; Vladimir Plungian. 1998. “Modality’s semantic map”. Linguistic Typology 2, 79-124.