L'Enonciation mediatisee (review)

Like Evidentiality: The linguistic coding of epistemology (ed. by Johanna Nichols and Wallace Chafe, Norwood, NJ; Ablex Publishing Corp., 1986), to which the editor refers in her introduction, the present volume is a collection of papers that grew out of a conference on the ways various languages grammatically or lexically encode the speaker’s subjective relation to the source, certainty, and/or veracity of the information being communicated. Like Nichols and Chafe, this volume contains articles treating Albanian (Remzi Pernaska, 31–46); Bulgarian (Zlatka Guentchéva, 47–70; Jack Feuillet, 71–86, who also gives Turkish, Latvian, and German examples); Quechua (Gerald Taylor, 259–69); Tibetan (four dialects); Nicolas Tournadre, 195–214); and Turkish (Métiyé Meydan, 125–44; Mehmet Bastürk, Laurent Danon-Boileau, and Mary-Annick Morel, 145–54). Whereas the other articles in Nichols & Chafe 1986 focus on Akha, Chinese Pidgin Russia, Japanese, English, Jaqi languages, Kashaya, Macedonian, Makah, Maricopa, Northern Iroquoian, Patwin, Sherpa, and Wintu, the other languages in G’s volume are Western Armenian (Anaïd Donabédian, 87–108); Nepali (Boyd Michailovski, 109–24); Persian and Tadjik (Gilbert Lazard, 21–30); Nenets (Jean Perrot, 157–68); Estonian, Finnish, and Saami (M. M. Jocelyne Fernandezvest, 169–82); Korean (In-Bong Chang, 183–94); Inuit (Philippe Mennecier and Bernadette Robbe, 233–48); Squamish (Peter Jacobs, 249–58); Caxinauá (Eliane Camargo, 271–84); Russian (Ekaterina V. Rakhilina, 299–304); French (Patrick Dendale and Walter De Mulder, 305–18); Chukchi, Koryak, and Itelmen (François Jacquesson, 215–32); and thirty-one languages from the EUROTYP project discussed by Paolo Ramat (287–98). Both volumes are divided into three sections, but whereas the division in Nichols & Chafe 1986 is basically geographic—(1) North and South America, (2) Europe and Asia, and (3) English and general—G’s division is grammatical in that mediative marking (to use the more inclusive term coined by Lazard, see below) may employ: (1) perfect-related forms (21–154); (2) auxiliaries, suffixes, and particles (157–284); and (3) adverbs and modals (287–318). Nonetheless, it is worth noting that geographic groupings also emerge: The languages with mediative forms related to perfects are from Southeastern Europe and West or Central Asia; those in group 2 are from North and South America together with Northern Eurasia and East Asia, while group 3 (leaving to one side mention of languages belonging to the previous groups) draws mainly on Romance, Germanic, and North Slavic languages, which can be construed as West and Central Europe (taking Central in opposition to North and South rather than the usual East and West). The book also contains a useful introduction by G (11–18) and an index of authors cited (319–22).

This grammatical category, first identified (for Turkish) by Maḥmūd al-Kāšğarī in the eleventh century ce as an opposition of the type witnessed/unwitnessed, continues to provide fertile ground for a wealth of terminological proposals. In 1911 Boas (Handbook of American Indian languages, Part 1, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office) published descriptions that led to the coining of the term ‘evidential’, popularized by Roman Jakobson (‘Shifters, verbal categories, and the Russian verb’, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Russian Language Project, 1957; reprinted in his Selected Writings, vol. 2, 130–47, The Hague: Mouton) originally with reference to Bulgarian, the language treated by G herself (and also Feuillet) in this collection. As G points out in her introduction (13), this term focuses on only one aspect of the category. The French médiatif, first proposed by Gilbert Lazard in 1956 (Caractères distinctifs de la langue Tadjik, Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique: 52/1:117–86, Paris) in connection with Tadjik, attempts to capture the notion that...