Language, Source, And Certainty: Evidentiality From A Cross-linguistic Perspective
Auteurs : Bounouara Mokhtaria .
Résumé
Sometimes, in the conversation, it is not about what is said but about how it is being said, how the interlocutors know from where the information was taken. The source of knowledge can make all the difference, and this is what is referred to as evidentiality. This latter is often understood as the grammatical marking of information sources, with categories including direct experience, inference, report, and assumption (Aikhenvald, 2004). Imagine a system where there is a linguistic detector of the origin of the source i.e. you do not just say that something happened but convey how do you know it happened and the source of that exact report. The use of grammatical evidentials (such as morphological markers) versus lexical methods (such as adverbs or verbs that indicate belief or hearsay) to transmit evidential meaning, however, varies greatly among languages. Whereas languages like English, French, and Arabic mostly employ lexical and syntactic methods, languages with grammatical evidentiality, like Tuyuka, have evidential markers that are required and firmly ingrained in grammar
Mots clés
Evidentiality ; information ; arabic ; english ; tuyuca ; information source
