Studies in Evidentiality (review)

The fourteen papers published in this volume originate from a workshop on evidentiality held at La Trobe University in August 2001. The opening essay by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald (1–31) outlines the basic concepts of evidentiality—the strategy of coding the speaker’s information source which in various languages ranges from a simple indication of the existence of some evidence to complicated systems marking—and the types of evidence (e.g. firsthand or reported, visual or other sensory, direct or inferred). This essay also outlines the scope of the other papers, such as the evidential system and its semantic range, ties between evidentiality and other grammatical categories (e.g. tense-aspect), its role in discourse and the strategies of its use, its development, and correlations between evidentials and cultural attitudes.

The next five papers deal with languages or dialects that exhibit well-developed evidentiality systems. These are Shipibo-Konibo, a Panoan language spoken in the Peruvian Amazon (Pilar M. Valenzuela, 33–61); Qiang, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in East Tibet (Randy J. LaPolla, 63–78); the Southern Athabaskan language Western Apache, spoken in east central Arizona (Willem J.de Reuse, 79–100); Eastern Pomo in Northern California (Sally McLendon, 101–29); and Tariana, a North Arawak language in the Brazilian Vaupés region (Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, 131–64).

Other papers present languages in which evidentiality has a smaller range of relations with other grammatical categories: Jarawara, a dialect of the Madi language spoken in southern Amazonia (R. M. W. Dixon, 165–87); the Balkan system with emphasis on Macedonian and Albanian (Victor A. Friedman, 189–218); several Yukaghir languages spoken in three villages in northeast Russia (Elena Maslova, 219–35); Mỹky, a language isolate spoken in Mato Grosso, Brazil (Ruth Montserrat and R. M. W. Dixon, 236–41); and Abkhaz, a West Caucasian language (Viacheslav Chirikba, 243–72).

Two contributions are about cases of partial coding of evidentiality, treating Turkic, which, unlike other systems, merely indicates the existence of a source of information without specifying the kind of evidence (Lars Johanson, 273–90) and West Greenlandic, which exhibits scattered coding of evidentiality shared with markers of epistemic modality (Michael Fortescue, 291–306).

The final paper (Brian D. Joseph, 307–27) presents further theoretical insights into the question of how evidentiality can be understood as a manifestation of deixis, especially since it marks the speaker’s stance or point of view with regard to information sources. From that perspective, he notes the existence of expressions of evidentiality in some ancient Indo-European languages, such as the Anatolian quotative and the injunctive in Vedic Sanskrit.

Much can be learned from this volume about how and why languages grammaticalize evidentiality.