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Introduction: evidentiality and related notions
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Journal of Pragmatics 33 (2001) 339-348 www.elsevier.nl/locate/pragma
Introduction" Evidentiality and related notions P a t r i c k D e n d a l e a'b, Liliane T a s m o w s k P , * " Universiteit Antwerpen - UIA, Department of Romance languages and literatures, Universiteitsplein 1, B-2610 Wih'ijk, Belgium t, Universit~ de Metz, D~partement des sciences du langage, lie du Saulcy, F-57045 Metz Cedex 1, France
Abstract This presentation reviews some major topics in current research on evidentiality and related notions, notably: (1) the semantic domain of evidentiality and its various subdomains; (2) the relation between the domain of evidentiality and the domain of modality, including their linguistic marking; (3) the grammatical status of evidentiality and mediativity. © 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
"The Wintu never say it is bread. They say, 'It looks-to-mebread' or 'It feels-to-me bread' or 'I-have-heard-it-to-be bread' or 'I-infer-from-evidence-that-it-is-bread' or 'I-think-it-to-bebread', or, vaguely and timelessly, 'according-to-my-experience-be bread'" (Lee, 1959: 137). The quotation above illustrates a phenomenon linguists have come to call evidentiality. It's the fact that in many languages, as in Wintu, the source of information is grammatically or lexically marked in utterances. This special issue deals with that phenomenon.
1. Terminological problems Following Jacobsen (1986), the term evidentiality was introduced into linguistics about fifty years ago in a posthumously published grammar of Kwakiutl compiled by Franz Boas (1947). It took a further decade, however, and the publication of Roman Jakobson's Shifters, verbal categories, a n d the R u s s i a n verb (1957), for the term to come into common usage. By the early eighties, evidentiality gradually became an * E-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] 0378-2166/01/$ - see front matter © 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S0378-2166(00)00005-9
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establishedresearch topic in linguistics. The first milestone was a conference organized in Berkeley in 1981, billed by the organizers as the "first conference ever assembled to compare evidentiality in a variety of languages". The proceedings were eventually published under the title Evidentiality: The linguistic" coding of epistemology (Chafe and Nichols, 1986). With the appearance of this influential collection, the notion of evidentiality was fii'mly established in linguistics. Since then, the topic has been dealt with from a wide variety of perspectives ranging from typological studies (where it had its origins), over studies on grammaticalization, to cognitive linguistics, syntax, and pragmatics, as exemplified by the present issue of Journal of Pragmatics, which contains seven selected papers on evidentiality originally presented in the two panels on the topic at the 6th International Pragmatics Conference in Reims, July 1998. The relevance of the semantic domain of evidentiality, which centers around the sources of information or sources of knowledge behind assertions, was recognized long before the term became common. It dates back at least to the beginning of the century with the works of Boas (1911) and Sapir (1921) (cf. Jacobsen, 1986: 4) and possibly further to the latter nineteenth century (cf. Guentch6va, 1986: 14-15). From the earliest discussions onwards, references to sources of information have been linked closely to attitudes about the epistemic status of information, because the linguistic markers encoding these two semantic domains are often the same. This happens in the early literature, for example, in Boas' (1947) description of a small group of suffixes expressing "source and certainty of knowledge" (cf. Jacobsen, 1986: 4) and in Sapir's (1921: 114) discussion of certain forms expressing what he called "the source or nature of the speaker's knowledge" (today's 'evidentials'). Both authors explicitly link reference to sources of information (i.e. evidentiality in the narrow sense) with reference to certainty of knowledge (i.e. epistemic modality). The exact nature of the relationship between the two semantic domains, however, is still one of the main problems in this research area, and it constitutes a recurrent theme of the present volume. French has two terms corresponding to English evidentiality. The first is the loan word dvidentialitd, which was introduced into French linguistics by Co Vet (1988) in a review of Chafe and Nichols (1986). While this term has the advantage of clearly showing the link to mainstream American studies of the subject, it is rejected by some French scholars (cf. Guentch6va, 1996) on the grounds that the French word ~vidence, with which dvidentialit~ is related, has, in fact, a meaning that is opposite to what the English term evidence evokes, viz. that the information communicated is 'evident', rendering any further specification of its source or supporting evidence superfluous. The term preferred by these French scholars is m~diatif. It is remarkable to note how similar the development of the term mddiatif in French linguistics has been to that of evidentiality in English linguistics. Introduced by Lazard (1956) at about the time that Jakobson (1957) popularized the term evidential, the term m~diatifwas revived by Guentch6va in the early 1990s and a conference on the 'm6diatif' (henceforth 'mediative', following Chvany, 1999) was organized in Paris in 1994. Its proceedings, published under the title L'~nonciation m~diatis~e (Guentch6va, 1996) ten years after Chafe and Nichols' seminal volume, helped give the term its legitimate place in the French-speaking linguistic community.
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The semantic domain of mediativity is related to, but not fully identical to, that of evidentiality. The difference is prefigured by the root elements of the respective terms. Instead of focusing on the kind of evidence at the speaker's disposal, the term mediativity focuses on the special character of utterances mediated by references to the evidence, i.e., on distances between speakers and what they say. As will be seen below, this has consequences for the division of the general category into subcategories. In what follows, we will use evidentiality/mediativity to refer to the semantic domain and evidential~mediative to refer to linguistic markers by which it is manifested.
2. C o n c e p t u a l
problems
As said, some problems in modern research on evidentiality and mediativity are partly due to a lack of consistent terminology. The main questions raised by researchers, if often only implicitly, can be grouped as follows: - the question of the scope and definition of the terms evidentiality and evidential and their relation to the terms epistemic modality and epistemic modal marker; - the question of the classification of the various subdomains of evidentiality, including some at the periphery, such as mirativity (the marking of a proposition as representing information that is new to the speaker) (cf. DeLancey, 1986, 1997, this volume), and the proliferation of terms used to label those subdomains; l - questions concerning such issues as the extent to which evidential/mediative markers constitute a grammaticalized morphosyntactic category and the interrelationships between the different values of the markers (as well as their relation to the general category label, evidential or mediative).
2.1. The scope of evidentiality and evidential in relation to modality and modal marker Although most scholars would agree that indicating the source of information is conceptually different from indicating the speaker's assessment of the reliability of information, this distinction is not always clear in present uses of the terms evidentiality and modality. In general, there is no one-to-one relation between evidentiality/evidential and the conceptual domain 'source of information' on the one hand, and between modality/modal marker and the conceptual domain of 'reliability of information' on the other. Three relations between the notions of evidentiality and modality can be found in modern studies: disjunction (where they are conceptually distinguished from each
J For an attempt to establish a uniform terminological apparatus using paraphrases involving a limited number of semantic primitives, see Wierzbicka (1994).
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other), inclusion (where one is regarded as falling within the semantic scope of the other), and overlap 2 (where they partly intersect). We can speak of 'disjunction' between the conceptual domains of evidentiality and modality whenever one of these notions is defined in opposition to the other. Hardman's (1986:115) statement that evidentials "indicate how one has knowledge of what one is saying" (emphasis added) is an example of a definition that focuses on what Willett (1988: 54) calls 'evidentiality in the narrow sense', denying an explicit relationship between evidentiality and modality. More often, however, the relation between evidentiality and modality in the literature is one of 'inclusion', with one of the two concepts being regarded as falling within the scope of the other. The term evidentiality is then used in a broad sense to refer both to the source and the reliability of the speaker's knowledge. 3 This position is illustrated by the following comment about the functions of evidentials by Matlock (1989:215): "[E]videntials, linguistic units comprising part of epistemic modality, code a speaker's source of information, and some degree of certainty about that information." Here, the notion of 'degree of certainty' is included within the semantic scope of evidentials, making the term evidentiality both a co-hyponym of modality and a hyperonym of the two notions together. The opposite view, where the term modality is used as a co-hyponym of evidentiality and as a hyperonym of both notions, is also prevalent. We see it, for instance, in Willett's statement: "[T]here is little doubt that evidentiality as a semantic domain is primarily modal" (1988: 52), and, if somewhat less explicitly, in Palmer's Mood and modality, where evidentials are subsumed under the heading epistemic modality, or simply Epistemic (1986: 66), and where the Quotative (which is traditionally classified as an evidential) is treated as a "modal feature" (1986: 7). 4 The relation of inclusion between notions of evidentiality and modality can be justified by an appeal to some type of causal or final connection between the two notions. Most often -s, the 'included' notion is evidentiality, because marking the source of information can be imagined as an indirect means of marking an epistemic attitude towards the information, or - as in Jan Nuyts' contribution to this volume - because evidentiality can be of use in defining epistemic modality. Finally, an 'overlapping' relation can be found in van der Auwera and Plungian (1998: 86), where modality and evidentiality partly intersect. The interface between the two concepts is then occupied by the evidential value 'inferential' (or 'inferential evidentiality'), which the authors claim to be identical to the modal value of epistemic necessity. Such diverging opinions as to the relationship between evidentiality and modality are largely due to the empirical fact that in the evidential systems of many lan-
2 Cf. Dendale (1991) and the table in van der Auwera and Plungian (1997: 85) for more details. 3 For a discussion of this point, see Willett (1988: 54-55). For still broader interpretations including other domains, see Chafe (1986: 263) and Mithun (1986: 89). 4 The singularity of Palmer's position is that the term modality is not at once a hyperonym and a cohyponym. It is only hyperonymous, while the hyponym is Judgements. But not always: according to Friedman (1986: 168-169) "source [is] an implication derived fi'om [...] attitude" in Balkan languages.
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guages, the forms marking the source of information also mark the speaker's attitude towards the reliability of that information.
2.2. The subdomains of evidentiality Scholars more or less agree about a limited number of subdivisions of the semantic domain of evidentiality in the narrow sense (see later). A summary is found in Willett (1988: 57), from which Fig. 1 is taken6: Direct Types of Evidence
- Attested
Reported
Visual Auditory Other sensory Secondhand Thirdhand Folklore
} (hearsay)
Indirect Inferring
( Results Reasoning
Fig. 1. The semantic domain of evidentiality. When evidentiality is interpreted in a broader sense, other subdomains are added to the purely evidential ones listed in Fig. 1. Mithun (1986: 86-90), for example, a proponent of the broader view, defines evidentiality as the: - specification of - specification of label - specification of - specification of
the source of information the degree of precision or truth or appropriateness of a category the probability of the truth the expectations concerning the probability of a statement
The first subdomain can be equated to evidentiality in the narrow sense, the third to modality in the narrow sense, and the fourth to what DeLancey (1997, this volume) calls mirativity and Lazard (this volume) the (ad)mirative, i.e., a subdomain situated between evidentiality (direct source of information) and modality (speaker's attitude: surprise). There is no specific term for the second subdomain, but it might be relegated to modal assessments of the degree of likelihood of propositions or degrees of appropriateness of particular elements of propositions. Hedges like sort of, kind of, etc. illustrate that subdomain of evidentiality in the broad sense.
2.3. The evidential as a grammatical category The following quotations reflect the problems of trying to classify evidentials in terms of grammatical categories: 6 Plungian's paper in this volume suggests improvementson this classificationsystem, which, in turn, are discussed at the end of Lazard's contributionto this volume.
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"... all languages have means of qualifying [...] the origin of the information; however, not all languages have an evidential grammatical category." (Lazard, this volume) "It is important to distinguish true evidential categories from other forms which SEEM evidential, but are not. The noun form of the term 'evidentials' or 'an evidential' does not simply include anything one might consider to have an evidential function, that is, to express evidence for something else. Rather, evidentials are a special grammatical phenomenon." (Anderson, 1986: 274) There are two problems here. First, the problem of trying to establish whether evidential and mediative are genuine grammatical categories and elucidating the criteria to be used in such an evaluation. Second, the problem of deciding whether to call a marker with multiple values (evidential plus others) 'evidential' or 'mediative' rather than something else. How do we label forms with multiple values, only some of which are evidential? With regard to the first problem, the mediative is considered as a genuine grammatical category by Lazard (this volume). Evidentiality has been viewed in the same way by some scholars. Others, however, have argued against this view - for example, Palmer (1986), who claims that modality is a grammatical category similar to aspect, tense, number, gender, etc. but refuses to assign the same status to evidentiality, which he reduces to a kind of subcategory. Lazard (this volume) uses two criteria to assign a particular form the status of evidential grammatical category (see also Anderson, 1986: 274-275): (a) the form must be part of the grammatical system rather than of the lexicon of the language; and (b) the semantic-pragmatic content (signifi6) of the form must basically be a reference to the source of information. This last requirement is formulated in Anderson (1986: 274) as follows: "[E]videntials have the indication of evidence [...] as their primary meaning, not only as a pragmatic inference. ''7 These two criteria make it possible to distinguish between three types of languages: (1) languages in which evidentiality has been grammaticalized; (2) languages which render evidential meanings by means of lexical expressions; and (3) languages where "evidential meanings are not conveyed by specific forms, but occasionally expressed by forms whose central meaning is something else" (Lazard, this volume). The application of the two criteria, however, is not without problems. With regard to the first criterion, one may note, following Anderson (1986: 275), that the notion of 'grammatical system' can easily be extended beyond suffixes, clitics, and particles to include auxiliaries and even free syntactic forms. In this view, auxiliaries like must in John must have arrived (because I see his coat on the chair) are typical evidentials (1986: 274). But this is quite in contrast to Lazard, who claims that evidentiality has not been grammaticalized at all in English. Lazard's second criterion confronts us with the problem of dealing with polysemous markers whose semantic values include non-evidential meanings. A number of different cases can be distinguished:
7 Anderson (1986: 274) adds a third criterion: "Evidentials are not themselves the main predication of the clause, but are rather a specification added to a factual claim ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE".
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- A form may be monosemous, having only a single meaning related to one of the subdomains of evidentiality. In such cases, the use of the term evidential is unproblematic. - A form may have multiple meanings evoking different subdomains of evidentiality (cf. Fig. 1). The use of the term evidential in this case is also safe. Should the need arise, more specific terms such as inferential or quotative could be used. - Finally, a form may have multiple meanings, some of which are not evidential, but modal, mirative, or of an entirely different kind, e.g., temporal, aspectual, etc. (see the multiple values of the Modern Western Armenian form in -er discussed by Donab6dian (this volume) and the Nakh-Daghestanian markers presented by Tatevosov (this volume)). The first two cases seem to be the exception rather than the rule. Cases of the third type, which are the most frequent, raise the twofold problem of accounting for the interrelationships between the different values of a form and deciding whether the label 'evidential' (which makes sense only if the 'source of information' value clearly predominates) is appropriate. Is the simple presence of a single particular meaning related to the semantic domain of source of information (evidentiality in the narrow sense) sufficient to classify a form as an evidential marker? The meanings of the French conditional in a sentence like ll y aurait de nombreuses victimes ('There are, it is said/it seems, many victims') are a case in point. Here, the conditional simultaneously evokes: (1) attribution of the information to a third party (= evidentiality), (2) uncertainty of the information (= modality) and (3) non-commitment of the speaker regarding the information (cf. Dendale, 1993). It is hard to establish which of these three meanings, if any, is primary. Moreover, the conditional is part of a larger paradigm where it also takes on purely hypothetical, temporal, or hedging meanings. Should we, then, primarily analyze the French conditional as an evidential? Or claim that only one of its uses is evidential and treat the other (apparently quite divergent) uses as homonyms? Or derive its evidential value from one of its other values or from some superordinate one?
3. S e m a n t i c
c a t e g o r i e s vs. l i n g u i s t i c f o r m s
What has been said so far hopefully provides both insight into the main thrust of the contributions to this volume and preparation for an appreciation of the more obvious differences between them. Some contributors take the (general) notion of evidentiality as given, while others start from an analysis of particular forms which are traditionally labeled evidentials. As already suggested, evidential markers are specific to a particular language, and within that language they can be monosemous, polysemous, or homonymous. When translated into the markers of another language, they can also be monosemous, polysemous, or homonymous. Hence, in translating a polysemous marker from language A into a polysemous marker in language B, there is obviously no guarantee
whatsoever that the markers in the two languages will display similar patterns of polysemy. A similar caveat holds for the other cases. Semantic categories, on the other hand, although hypothesized to be universal, can only be captured in terms of conceptual distinctions made by particular forms. A semantic map based on logical distinctions alone would, no doubt, predict the existence of divisions and interconnections that are not present in any language at all, while at the same time omitting certain others that are. The papers collected in this volume propose various solutions to the problem of classifying evidential forms, semantic categories, and their mutual relations Vladimir Plungian presents a cross-linguistic classification of evidential values, including the so-called (ad)mirative value, and proposes a typology of evidential systems based on the distinction between ‘direct’, ‘reflected’, and ‘mediated’ evidence. Gilbert Lazard discusses the grammati~a~ization of evidentiality in different languages of South Eastern Europe and the Middle East, where evidential discourse is opposed to neutral discourse. He also addresses the problem of the cross-linguistic comparison of evidential systems and the difficulty of devising superordinate labels for categories. Scott DeLancey examines the relationship between mirativity and evidentiality. He argues, based on evidence from Tibetan, Hare, and some other languages, that mirativity must be recognized as a distinct semantic and grammatical category. He also explains why in many languages mirative and inferential readings combine in the same form. Jan Nuyts reanalyzes the distinction between objective and subjective epistemic modality in the light of Dutch and German data, and, more generally, investigates the role of subjectivity in epistemic modal expressions. He argues for an interpretation of the dimension of subjectivity in terms of a separate evidential qualification. Stanka Fitneva uses Bulgarian data to argue against the claim that source-of-information (evidentiality) has consistent implications for understanding speakers’ attitudes about reliability-of-info~ation (modality). She claims that there is no one-to-one correspondence between markers of source-ofinformation and markers of degrees of certainty, and concludes that epistemic marking in Bulgarian characterizes source-of-information rather than speaker’s attitude. Anaid DonabCdian criticizes the use of the label evidential in connection with the Western Armenian marker -u. Drawing upon a comparison of Russian corpus-data and spontaneously produced Western Armenian speech data, she shows that the basic value of -el- is not evidential but moda and should be described in enunciative terms rather than in source-of-knowledge terms. Sergei Tatevosov studies verbal categories expressing indirect evidence and resultative or anterior meanings in three Nakh-Daghest~ian languages. He shows that while these categories, traditionally labeled perfects, both originate from the same lexical source and signal that the speaker’s statement is based on indirect evidence (either inferred or reported), their additional uses differ significantly. In sum, the contributions selected for this volume all reflect the authors’ efforts to reduce the gap between the description of specific linguistic markers and the creation of a semantic map of evidentiality.
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References
Anderson, Lloyd B., 1986. Evidentials, paths of change, and mental maps: Typologically regular asymmetries. In: W. Chafe and J. Nichols, eds., Evidentiality: The linguistic coding of epistemology, 273-312. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Boas, Franz, 1911. Kwakiutl. In: F. Boas, ed., Handbook of American Indian languages. Part 1, 423-557. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Boas, Franz, 1947. Kwakiutl grammar, with a glossary of the suffixes. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 37: 201-377. Chafe, Wallace, 1986. Evidentiality in English conversation and academic writing. In: W. Chafe and J. Nichols, eds., Evidentiality: The linguistic coding of epistemology, 261-272. Norwood, N J: Ablex. Chafe, Wallace and Johanna Nichols, eds., 1986. Evidentiality: The linguistic coding of epistemology. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Chvany, Catherine C., 1999. Book review of Zlatka GuentchEva, 1996. Journal of Pragmatics 31: 435-439. DeLancey, Scott, 1986. Evidentiality and volition in Tibetan. In: W. Chafe and J. Nichols, eds., Evidentiality: The linguistic coding of epistemology, 203-213. Norwood: Ablex. DeLancey, Scott, 1997. Mirativity: The grammatical marking of unexpected information. Linguistic Typology 1: 33-52. Dendale, Patrick, 1991. Le marquage 6pist6mique de l'6nonc6. Esquisse d'une th6orie avec applications au fran~ais. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Antwerp (UIA). Dendale, Patrick, 1993. Le conditionnel de I'information incertaine: Marqueur modal ou marqueur 6videntiel? In: G. Hilty, ed., Actes du XXe congr6s international de linguistique et philologie romanes, Universit6 de Zurich (6-11 avril 1992), tome 1, 165-176. Ttibingen: Francke. Dendale, Patrick and Liliane Tasmowski, eds., 1994. Les sources du savoir et leurs marques linguistiques. Langue franqaise 102. Paris: Larousse. Friedman, Victor A., 1986. Evidentiality in the Balkans: Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Albanian. In: W. Chafe and J. Nichols, eds., Evidentiality: The linguistic coding of epistemology, 168-187. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. GuentchEva, Zlatka, ed., 1996. L'6noncation m6diatis6e. Louvain: Peeters. Hardman, Martha James, 1986. Datasource marking in the Jaqi languages. In: W. Chafe and J. Nichols, eds., Evidentiality: The linguistic coding of epistemology, 113-136. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Jacobsen, William H. Jr., 1986. The heterogeneity of evidentials in Makah. In: W. Chafe and J. Nichols, eds., Evidentiality" The linguistic coding of epistemology, 3-28. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Jakobson, Roman, 1957. Shifters, verbal categories, and the Russian verb. Harvard University: Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. (Reprinted in: Jacobson, Roman, 1971. Selected writings, vol. II, 130-147. The Hague: Mouton.) Lazard, Gilbert, 1956. Caract~res distinctifs de la langue tadjik. Bulletin de la Soci6t6 de Linguistique de Paris 52: 117-186. Lee, Dorothy, 1959. Freedom and culture. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Matlock, Teenie, 1989. Metaphor and the grammaticalization of evidentials. Proceedings of the 15th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society 15: 215-225. Mithun, Marianne, 1986. Evidential diachrony in Northern Iroquoian. In: W. Chafe and J. Nichols, eds., Evidentiality: The linguistic coding of epistemology, 89-112. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Palmer, Frank R., 1986. Mood and modality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sapir, Edward, 1921. Language. An introduction to the study of speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. van der Auwera, Johan and Vladimir Plungian, 1997. On modality's semantic map. Linguistic Typology 2: 7%124. Vet, Co, 1988. Book review of Wallace Chafe and Johanna Nichols, 1986. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 33: 65-77. Wierzbicka, Anna, 1994. Semantics and epistemology: The meaning of 'evidentials' in a cross-linguistic perspective. Language Sciences 16:88-137. Willett, Thomas, 1988. A crosslinguistic survey of the grammaticalization of evidentiality. Studies in Language 12: 51-97.
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Patrick Dendale, born in 1959, is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp (Belgium) and an associate professor (maitre de conferences) at the University of Metz (France). His research focuses mainly on evidentiality and modality (Ph.D. in 1991 on French evidential markers and their relation to m~ality) and on spatial prepositions and their metaphorical extensions. He is a member of the researchgroups ‘Emploi de la langue, iangue d’emploi’ (ELLE) (Antwerp) and CELTED (Metz). With Liliane Tasmowski, he has published the first French reader on evidentiality (a special issue of Langue He is currently editing readers on the French conditionnel (with Liliane Tasmowski) and on jbuyaise). Modal verbs in Romance and Gernzunic languages (with Johan van der Auwera). Liiiane Tasmowski, born in 1938, is a Professor at the University of Antwerp (Belgium). Her pubhcations concern mainly Romance languages, especially French and Ruman~n. She is currently working on the interaction between various grammar-modules and knowledge of the world, which is one of the general interest topics of the research group “Emploi de la langue et langue d’emploi” (ELLE), in which she is engaged at Antwerp. Her recent publications include Pratiyue des langues r’omanes (with Sanda Reinheimer), Paris, L’Harmattan, 1997 and a reader on Le conditionncl, co-edited with Patrick Dendale (to appear at Metz, Klincksieck, 2000).
Journal of Pragmatics 33 (2001) 339-348 www.elsevier.nl/locate/pragma
Introduction" Evidentiality and related notions P a t r i c k D e n d a l e a'b, Liliane T a s m o w s k P , * " Universiteit Antwerpen - UIA, Department of Romance languages and literatures, Universiteitsplein 1, B-2610 Wih'ijk, Belgium t, Universit~ de Metz, D~partement des sciences du langage, lie du Saulcy, F-57045 Metz Cedex 1, France
Abstract This presentation reviews some major topics in current research on evidentiality and related notions, notably: (1) the semantic domain of evidentiality and its various subdomains; (2) the relation between the domain of evidentiality and the domain of modality, including their linguistic marking; (3) the grammatical status of evidentiality and mediativity. © 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
"The Wintu never say it is bread. They say, 'It looks-to-mebread' or 'It feels-to-me bread' or 'I-have-heard-it-to-be bread' or 'I-infer-from-evidence-that-it-is-bread' or 'I-think-it-to-bebread', or, vaguely and timelessly, 'according-to-my-experience-be bread'" (Lee, 1959: 137). The quotation above illustrates a phenomenon linguists have come to call evidentiality. It's the fact that in many languages, as in Wintu, the source of information is grammatically or lexically marked in utterances. This special issue deals with that phenomenon.
1. Terminological problems Following Jacobsen (1986), the term evidentiality was introduced into linguistics about fifty years ago in a posthumously published grammar of Kwakiutl compiled by Franz Boas (1947). It took a further decade, however, and the publication of Roman Jakobson's Shifters, verbal categories, a n d the R u s s i a n verb (1957), for the term to come into common usage. By the early eighties, evidentiality gradually became an * E-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] 0378-2166/01/$ - see front matter © 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S0378-2166(00)00005-9
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establishedresearch topic in linguistics. The first milestone was a conference organized in Berkeley in 1981, billed by the organizers as the "first conference ever assembled to compare evidentiality in a variety of languages". The proceedings were eventually published under the title Evidentiality: The linguistic" coding of epistemology (Chafe and Nichols, 1986). With the appearance of this influential collection, the notion of evidentiality was fii'mly established in linguistics. Since then, the topic has been dealt with from a wide variety of perspectives ranging from typological studies (where it had its origins), over studies on grammaticalization, to cognitive linguistics, syntax, and pragmatics, as exemplified by the present issue of Journal of Pragmatics, which contains seven selected papers on evidentiality originally presented in the two panels on the topic at the 6th International Pragmatics Conference in Reims, July 1998. The relevance of the semantic domain of evidentiality, which centers around the sources of information or sources of knowledge behind assertions, was recognized long before the term became common. It dates back at least to the beginning of the century with the works of Boas (1911) and Sapir (1921) (cf. Jacobsen, 1986: 4) and possibly further to the latter nineteenth century (cf. Guentch6va, 1986: 14-15). From the earliest discussions onwards, references to sources of information have been linked closely to attitudes about the epistemic status of information, because the linguistic markers encoding these two semantic domains are often the same. This happens in the early literature, for example, in Boas' (1947) description of a small group of suffixes expressing "source and certainty of knowledge" (cf. Jacobsen, 1986: 4) and in Sapir's (1921: 114) discussion of certain forms expressing what he called "the source or nature of the speaker's knowledge" (today's 'evidentials'). Both authors explicitly link reference to sources of information (i.e. evidentiality in the narrow sense) with reference to certainty of knowledge (i.e. epistemic modality). The exact nature of the relationship between the two semantic domains, however, is still one of the main problems in this research area, and it constitutes a recurrent theme of the present volume. French has two terms corresponding to English evidentiality. The first is the loan word dvidentialitd, which was introduced into French linguistics by Co Vet (1988) in a review of Chafe and Nichols (1986). While this term has the advantage of clearly showing the link to mainstream American studies of the subject, it is rejected by some French scholars (cf. Guentch6va, 1996) on the grounds that the French word ~vidence, with which dvidentialit~ is related, has, in fact, a meaning that is opposite to what the English term evidence evokes, viz. that the information communicated is 'evident', rendering any further specification of its source or supporting evidence superfluous. The term preferred by these French scholars is m~diatif. It is remarkable to note how similar the development of the term mddiatif in French linguistics has been to that of evidentiality in English linguistics. Introduced by Lazard (1956) at about the time that Jakobson (1957) popularized the term evidential, the term m~diatifwas revived by Guentch6va in the early 1990s and a conference on the 'm6diatif' (henceforth 'mediative', following Chvany, 1999) was organized in Paris in 1994. Its proceedings, published under the title L'~nonciation m~diatis~e (Guentch6va, 1996) ten years after Chafe and Nichols' seminal volume, helped give the term its legitimate place in the French-speaking linguistic community.
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The semantic domain of mediativity is related to, but not fully identical to, that of evidentiality. The difference is prefigured by the root elements of the respective terms. Instead of focusing on the kind of evidence at the speaker's disposal, the term mediativity focuses on the special character of utterances mediated by references to the evidence, i.e., on distances between speakers and what they say. As will be seen below, this has consequences for the division of the general category into subcategories. In what follows, we will use evidentiality/mediativity to refer to the semantic domain and evidential~mediative to refer to linguistic markers by which it is manifested.
2. C o n c e p t u a l
problems
As said, some problems in modern research on evidentiality and mediativity are partly due to a lack of consistent terminology. The main questions raised by researchers, if often only implicitly, can be grouped as follows: - the question of the scope and definition of the terms evidentiality and evidential and their relation to the terms epistemic modality and epistemic modal marker; - the question of the classification of the various subdomains of evidentiality, including some at the periphery, such as mirativity (the marking of a proposition as representing information that is new to the speaker) (cf. DeLancey, 1986, 1997, this volume), and the proliferation of terms used to label those subdomains; l - questions concerning such issues as the extent to which evidential/mediative markers constitute a grammaticalized morphosyntactic category and the interrelationships between the different values of the markers (as well as their relation to the general category label, evidential or mediative).
2.1. The scope of evidentiality and evidential in relation to modality and modal marker Although most scholars would agree that indicating the source of information is conceptually different from indicating the speaker's assessment of the reliability of information, this distinction is not always clear in present uses of the terms evidentiality and modality. In general, there is no one-to-one relation between evidentiality/evidential and the conceptual domain 'source of information' on the one hand, and between modality/modal marker and the conceptual domain of 'reliability of information' on the other. Three relations between the notions of evidentiality and modality can be found in modern studies: disjunction (where they are conceptually distinguished from each
J For an attempt to establish a uniform terminological apparatus using paraphrases involving a limited number of semantic primitives, see Wierzbicka (1994).
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other), inclusion (where one is regarded as falling within the semantic scope of the other), and overlap 2 (where they partly intersect). We can speak of 'disjunction' between the conceptual domains of evidentiality and modality whenever one of these notions is defined in opposition to the other. Hardman's (1986:115) statement that evidentials "indicate how one has knowledge of what one is saying" (emphasis added) is an example of a definition that focuses on what Willett (1988: 54) calls 'evidentiality in the narrow sense', denying an explicit relationship between evidentiality and modality. More often, however, the relation between evidentiality and modality in the literature is one of 'inclusion', with one of the two concepts being regarded as falling within the scope of the other. The term evidentiality is then used in a broad sense to refer both to the source and the reliability of the speaker's knowledge. 3 This position is illustrated by the following comment about the functions of evidentials by Matlock (1989:215): "[E]videntials, linguistic units comprising part of epistemic modality, code a speaker's source of information, and some degree of certainty about that information." Here, the notion of 'degree of certainty' is included within the semantic scope of evidentials, making the term evidentiality both a co-hyponym of modality and a hyperonym of the two notions together. The opposite view, where the term modality is used as a co-hyponym of evidentiality and as a hyperonym of both notions, is also prevalent. We see it, for instance, in Willett's statement: "[T]here is little doubt that evidentiality as a semantic domain is primarily modal" (1988: 52), and, if somewhat less explicitly, in Palmer's Mood and modality, where evidentials are subsumed under the heading epistemic modality, or simply Epistemic (1986: 66), and where the Quotative (which is traditionally classified as an evidential) is treated as a "modal feature" (1986: 7). 4 The relation of inclusion between notions of evidentiality and modality can be justified by an appeal to some type of causal or final connection between the two notions. Most often -s, the 'included' notion is evidentiality, because marking the source of information can be imagined as an indirect means of marking an epistemic attitude towards the information, or - as in Jan Nuyts' contribution to this volume - because evidentiality can be of use in defining epistemic modality. Finally, an 'overlapping' relation can be found in van der Auwera and Plungian (1998: 86), where modality and evidentiality partly intersect. The interface between the two concepts is then occupied by the evidential value 'inferential' (or 'inferential evidentiality'), which the authors claim to be identical to the modal value of epistemic necessity. Such diverging opinions as to the relationship between evidentiality and modality are largely due to the empirical fact that in the evidential systems of many lan-
2 Cf. Dendale (1991) and the table in van der Auwera and Plungian (1997: 85) for more details. 3 For a discussion of this point, see Willett (1988: 54-55). For still broader interpretations including other domains, see Chafe (1986: 263) and Mithun (1986: 89). 4 The singularity of Palmer's position is that the term modality is not at once a hyperonym and a cohyponym. It is only hyperonymous, while the hyponym is Judgements. But not always: according to Friedman (1986: 168-169) "source [is] an implication derived fi'om [...] attitude" in Balkan languages.
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guages, the forms marking the source of information also mark the speaker's attitude towards the reliability of that information.
2.2. The subdomains of evidentiality Scholars more or less agree about a limited number of subdivisions of the semantic domain of evidentiality in the narrow sense (see later). A summary is found in Willett (1988: 57), from which Fig. 1 is taken6: Direct Types of Evidence
- Attested
Reported
Visual Auditory Other sensory Secondhand Thirdhand Folklore
} (hearsay)
Indirect Inferring
( Results Reasoning
Fig. 1. The semantic domain of evidentiality. When evidentiality is interpreted in a broader sense, other subdomains are added to the purely evidential ones listed in Fig. 1. Mithun (1986: 86-90), for example, a proponent of the broader view, defines evidentiality as the: - specification of - specification of label - specification of - specification of
the source of information the degree of precision or truth or appropriateness of a category the probability of the truth the expectations concerning the probability of a statement
The first subdomain can be equated to evidentiality in the narrow sense, the third to modality in the narrow sense, and the fourth to what DeLancey (1997, this volume) calls mirativity and Lazard (this volume) the (ad)mirative, i.e., a subdomain situated between evidentiality (direct source of information) and modality (speaker's attitude: surprise). There is no specific term for the second subdomain, but it might be relegated to modal assessments of the degree of likelihood of propositions or degrees of appropriateness of particular elements of propositions. Hedges like sort of, kind of, etc. illustrate that subdomain of evidentiality in the broad sense.
2.3. The evidential as a grammatical category The following quotations reflect the problems of trying to classify evidentials in terms of grammatical categories: 6 Plungian's paper in this volume suggests improvementson this classificationsystem, which, in turn, are discussed at the end of Lazard's contributionto this volume.
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"... all languages have means of qualifying [...] the origin of the information; however, not all languages have an evidential grammatical category." (Lazard, this volume) "It is important to distinguish true evidential categories from other forms which SEEM evidential, but are not. The noun form of the term 'evidentials' or 'an evidential' does not simply include anything one might consider to have an evidential function, that is, to express evidence for something else. Rather, evidentials are a special grammatical phenomenon." (Anderson, 1986: 274) There are two problems here. First, the problem of trying to establish whether evidential and mediative are genuine grammatical categories and elucidating the criteria to be used in such an evaluation. Second, the problem of deciding whether to call a marker with multiple values (evidential plus others) 'evidential' or 'mediative' rather than something else. How do we label forms with multiple values, only some of which are evidential? With regard to the first problem, the mediative is considered as a genuine grammatical category by Lazard (this volume). Evidentiality has been viewed in the same way by some scholars. Others, however, have argued against this view - for example, Palmer (1986), who claims that modality is a grammatical category similar to aspect, tense, number, gender, etc. but refuses to assign the same status to evidentiality, which he reduces to a kind of subcategory. Lazard (this volume) uses two criteria to assign a particular form the status of evidential grammatical category (see also Anderson, 1986: 274-275): (a) the form must be part of the grammatical system rather than of the lexicon of the language; and (b) the semantic-pragmatic content (signifi6) of the form must basically be a reference to the source of information. This last requirement is formulated in Anderson (1986: 274) as follows: "[E]videntials have the indication of evidence [...] as their primary meaning, not only as a pragmatic inference. ''7 These two criteria make it possible to distinguish between three types of languages: (1) languages in which evidentiality has been grammaticalized; (2) languages which render evidential meanings by means of lexical expressions; and (3) languages where "evidential meanings are not conveyed by specific forms, but occasionally expressed by forms whose central meaning is something else" (Lazard, this volume). The application of the two criteria, however, is not without problems. With regard to the first criterion, one may note, following Anderson (1986: 275), that the notion of 'grammatical system' can easily be extended beyond suffixes, clitics, and particles to include auxiliaries and even free syntactic forms. In this view, auxiliaries like must in John must have arrived (because I see his coat on the chair) are typical evidentials (1986: 274). But this is quite in contrast to Lazard, who claims that evidentiality has not been grammaticalized at all in English. Lazard's second criterion confronts us with the problem of dealing with polysemous markers whose semantic values include non-evidential meanings. A number of different cases can be distinguished:
7 Anderson (1986: 274) adds a third criterion: "Evidentials are not themselves the main predication of the clause, but are rather a specification added to a factual claim ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE".
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- A form may be monosemous, having only a single meaning related to one of the subdomains of evidentiality. In such cases, the use of the term evidential is unproblematic. - A form may have multiple meanings evoking different subdomains of evidentiality (cf. Fig. 1). The use of the term evidential in this case is also safe. Should the need arise, more specific terms such as inferential or quotative could be used. - Finally, a form may have multiple meanings, some of which are not evidential, but modal, mirative, or of an entirely different kind, e.g., temporal, aspectual, etc. (see the multiple values of the Modern Western Armenian form in -er discussed by Donab6dian (this volume) and the Nakh-Daghestanian markers presented by Tatevosov (this volume)). The first two cases seem to be the exception rather than the rule. Cases of the third type, which are the most frequent, raise the twofold problem of accounting for the interrelationships between the different values of a form and deciding whether the label 'evidential' (which makes sense only if the 'source of information' value clearly predominates) is appropriate. Is the simple presence of a single particular meaning related to the semantic domain of source of information (evidentiality in the narrow sense) sufficient to classify a form as an evidential marker? The meanings of the French conditional in a sentence like ll y aurait de nombreuses victimes ('There are, it is said/it seems, many victims') are a case in point. Here, the conditional simultaneously evokes: (1) attribution of the information to a third party (= evidentiality), (2) uncertainty of the information (= modality) and (3) non-commitment of the speaker regarding the information (cf. Dendale, 1993). It is hard to establish which of these three meanings, if any, is primary. Moreover, the conditional is part of a larger paradigm where it also takes on purely hypothetical, temporal, or hedging meanings. Should we, then, primarily analyze the French conditional as an evidential? Or claim that only one of its uses is evidential and treat the other (apparently quite divergent) uses as homonyms? Or derive its evidential value from one of its other values or from some superordinate one?
3. S e m a n t i c
c a t e g o r i e s vs. l i n g u i s t i c f o r m s
What has been said so far hopefully provides both insight into the main thrust of the contributions to this volume and preparation for an appreciation of the more obvious differences between them. Some contributors take the (general) notion of evidentiality as given, while others start from an analysis of particular forms which are traditionally labeled evidentials. As already suggested, evidential markers are specific to a particular language, and within that language they can be monosemous, polysemous, or homonymous. When translated into the markers of another language, they can also be monosemous, polysemous, or homonymous. Hence, in translating a polysemous marker from language A into a polysemous marker in language B, there is obviously no guarantee
whatsoever that the markers in the two languages will display similar patterns of polysemy. A similar caveat holds for the other cases. Semantic categories, on the other hand, although hypothesized to be universal, can only be captured in terms of conceptual distinctions made by particular forms. A semantic map based on logical distinctions alone would, no doubt, predict the existence of divisions and interconnections that are not present in any language at all, while at the same time omitting certain others that are. The papers collected in this volume propose various solutions to the problem of classifying evidential forms, semantic categories, and their mutual relations Vladimir Plungian presents a cross-linguistic classification of evidential values, including the so-called (ad)mirative value, and proposes a typology of evidential systems based on the distinction between ‘direct’, ‘reflected’, and ‘mediated’ evidence. Gilbert Lazard discusses the grammati~a~ization of evidentiality in different languages of South Eastern Europe and the Middle East, where evidential discourse is opposed to neutral discourse. He also addresses the problem of the cross-linguistic comparison of evidential systems and the difficulty of devising superordinate labels for categories. Scott DeLancey examines the relationship between mirativity and evidentiality. He argues, based on evidence from Tibetan, Hare, and some other languages, that mirativity must be recognized as a distinct semantic and grammatical category. He also explains why in many languages mirative and inferential readings combine in the same form. Jan Nuyts reanalyzes the distinction between objective and subjective epistemic modality in the light of Dutch and German data, and, more generally, investigates the role of subjectivity in epistemic modal expressions. He argues for an interpretation of the dimension of subjectivity in terms of a separate evidential qualification. Stanka Fitneva uses Bulgarian data to argue against the claim that source-of-information (evidentiality) has consistent implications for understanding speakers’ attitudes about reliability-of-info~ation (modality). She claims that there is no one-to-one correspondence between markers of source-ofinformation and markers of degrees of certainty, and concludes that epistemic marking in Bulgarian characterizes source-of-information rather than speaker’s attitude. Anaid DonabCdian criticizes the use of the label evidential in connection with the Western Armenian marker -u. Drawing upon a comparison of Russian corpus-data and spontaneously produced Western Armenian speech data, she shows that the basic value of -el- is not evidential but moda and should be described in enunciative terms rather than in source-of-knowledge terms. Sergei Tatevosov studies verbal categories expressing indirect evidence and resultative or anterior meanings in three Nakh-Daghest~ian languages. He shows that while these categories, traditionally labeled perfects, both originate from the same lexical source and signal that the speaker’s statement is based on indirect evidence (either inferred or reported), their additional uses differ significantly. In sum, the contributions selected for this volume all reflect the authors’ efforts to reduce the gap between the description of specific linguistic markers and the creation of a semantic map of evidentiality.
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References
Anderson, Lloyd B., 1986. Evidentials, paths of change, and mental maps: Typologically regular asymmetries. In: W. Chafe and J. Nichols, eds., Evidentiality: The linguistic coding of epistemology, 273-312. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Boas, Franz, 1911. Kwakiutl. In: F. Boas, ed., Handbook of American Indian languages. Part 1, 423-557. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office. Boas, Franz, 1947. Kwakiutl grammar, with a glossary of the suffixes. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 37: 201-377. Chafe, Wallace, 1986. Evidentiality in English conversation and academic writing. In: W. Chafe and J. Nichols, eds., Evidentiality: The linguistic coding of epistemology, 261-272. Norwood, N J: Ablex. Chafe, Wallace and Johanna Nichols, eds., 1986. Evidentiality: The linguistic coding of epistemology. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Chvany, Catherine C., 1999. Book review of Zlatka GuentchEva, 1996. Journal of Pragmatics 31: 435-439. DeLancey, Scott, 1986. Evidentiality and volition in Tibetan. In: W. Chafe and J. Nichols, eds., Evidentiality: The linguistic coding of epistemology, 203-213. Norwood: Ablex. DeLancey, Scott, 1997. Mirativity: The grammatical marking of unexpected information. Linguistic Typology 1: 33-52. Dendale, Patrick, 1991. Le marquage 6pist6mique de l'6nonc6. Esquisse d'une th6orie avec applications au fran~ais. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Antwerp (UIA). Dendale, Patrick, 1993. Le conditionnel de I'information incertaine: Marqueur modal ou marqueur 6videntiel? In: G. Hilty, ed., Actes du XXe congr6s international de linguistique et philologie romanes, Universit6 de Zurich (6-11 avril 1992), tome 1, 165-176. Ttibingen: Francke. Dendale, Patrick and Liliane Tasmowski, eds., 1994. Les sources du savoir et leurs marques linguistiques. Langue franqaise 102. Paris: Larousse. Friedman, Victor A., 1986. Evidentiality in the Balkans: Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Albanian. In: W. Chafe and J. Nichols, eds., Evidentiality: The linguistic coding of epistemology, 168-187. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. GuentchEva, Zlatka, ed., 1996. L'6noncation m6diatis6e. Louvain: Peeters. Hardman, Martha James, 1986. Datasource marking in the Jaqi languages. In: W. Chafe and J. Nichols, eds., Evidentiality: The linguistic coding of epistemology, 113-136. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Jacobsen, William H. Jr., 1986. The heterogeneity of evidentials in Makah. In: W. Chafe and J. Nichols, eds., Evidentiality" The linguistic coding of epistemology, 3-28. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Jakobson, Roman, 1957. Shifters, verbal categories, and the Russian verb. Harvard University: Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. (Reprinted in: Jacobson, Roman, 1971. Selected writings, vol. II, 130-147. The Hague: Mouton.) Lazard, Gilbert, 1956. Caract~res distinctifs de la langue tadjik. Bulletin de la Soci6t6 de Linguistique de Paris 52: 117-186. Lee, Dorothy, 1959. Freedom and culture. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Matlock, Teenie, 1989. Metaphor and the grammaticalization of evidentials. Proceedings of the 15th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society 15: 215-225. Mithun, Marianne, 1986. Evidential diachrony in Northern Iroquoian. In: W. Chafe and J. Nichols, eds., Evidentiality: The linguistic coding of epistemology, 89-112. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Palmer, Frank R., 1986. Mood and modality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sapir, Edward, 1921. Language. An introduction to the study of speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. van der Auwera, Johan and Vladimir Plungian, 1997. On modality's semantic map. Linguistic Typology 2: 7%124. Vet, Co, 1988. Book review of Wallace Chafe and Johanna Nichols, 1986. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 33: 65-77. Wierzbicka, Anna, 1994. Semantics and epistemology: The meaning of 'evidentials' in a cross-linguistic perspective. Language Sciences 16:88-137. Willett, Thomas, 1988. A crosslinguistic survey of the grammaticalization of evidentiality. Studies in Language 12: 51-97.
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Patrick Dendale, born in 1959, is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp (Belgium) and an associate professor (maitre de conferences) at the University of Metz (France). His research focuses mainly on evidentiality and modality (Ph.D. in 1991 on French evidential markers and their relation to m~ality) and on spatial prepositions and their metaphorical extensions. He is a member of the researchgroups ‘Emploi de la langue, iangue d’emploi’ (ELLE) (Antwerp) and CELTED (Metz). With Liliane Tasmowski, he has published the first French reader on evidentiality (a special issue of Langue He is currently editing readers on the French conditionnel (with Liliane Tasmowski) and on jbuyaise). Modal verbs in Romance and Gernzunic languages (with Johan van der Auwera). Liiiane Tasmowski, born in 1938, is a Professor at the University of Antwerp (Belgium). Her pubhcations concern mainly Romance languages, especially French and Ruman~n. She is currently working on the interaction between various grammar-modules and knowledge of the world, which is one of the general interest topics of the research group “Emploi de la langue et langue d’emploi” (ELLE), in which she is engaged at Antwerp. Her recent publications include Pratiyue des langues r’omanes (with Sanda Reinheimer), Paris, L’Harmattan, 1997 and a reader on Le conditionncl, co-edited with Patrick Dendale (to appear at Metz, Klincksieck, 2000).