Evidence for Evidentiality

“ Evidence for Evidentiality is a welcome contribution to the existing knowledge on evidentiality. The book, which covers theoretical and descriptive issues, succeeds in demonstrating that evidentiality is an identifiable category across languages, albeit a complex and elusive one. The analysis of phenomena pertaining to language acquisition, polysemy or meaning extensions attest to the intricate relationship between evidentiality and related categories such as factuality, knowledge and cognition, epistemic and deontic modality, subjectivity, tense and lexical aspect. The book has a wide coverage of evidential markers (including nine languages: six European, two East-Asian and Yurakaré from South America) and of different methods for the study of evidentiality, such as the use of corpus data, reference grammars, historical sources, native speaker intuitions, and experiments. Evidence for Evidentiality is a must for students and academics undertaking research or interested in deepening knowledge in the domain of evidentiality.”

“All in all, based on a sound empirical footing, this collection offers a springboard for looking into evidentiality from a wider perspective, especially pragmatics, using diverse approaches and methodologies. By doing this, it contributes significantly to the way of pinning down the genre-specific, context-specific even socio-cultural-specific evidential values across languages and thus obtaining a panoramic picture of the complexity of evidentiality.”