Evidentiality and Epistemological Stance: Narrative Retelling (review)

Based on a reworking of Mushin’s 1998 Ph.D. thesis, this book examines the extralinguistic and discourse factors involved in the choice of evidential forms and strategies used by speakers of Macedonian, Japanese, and English in a particular task—the retelling of the personal narratives of others.

The first three chapters set up the theoretical framework of the study. The ‘Introduction’ (1–15) looks at those concepts and theories that underlie the analysis, including discussions of subjectivity, deixis, viewpoint, and the concept of changes of deictic center, within the overall framework of cognitive grammar.

Ch. 2, ‘Evidentiality’ (17–50), essentially a critical literature review, looks at the contrasting analyses of evidentiality in terms of source of information vs. speaker attitude and how these are linked, and it examines the range of structures that can code evidential notions, from lexical to highly grammaticalized evidential markers. It includes a discussion of grammaticalization as it applies to evidentials and contrasts the grammaticalization features of Quechua, Makah, and Lhasa Tibetan evidentials. In my opinion, this is one of the clearest short descriptions in the available literature of the many complex issues involved in the study of evidentiality.

The following chapter, ‘Epistemological stance’ (51–83), explores the concept of epistemological stance, the ‘construal of information with respect to a speaker’s assessment of their epistemological status’ (58), that is, how speakers choose to represent the way they acquired or know information, which may not necessarily be the actual means by which they came to know the information. The adoption of a particular epistemological stance depends on extralinguistic factors: the source of information, the interactional setting, the cultural setting, and the speaker’s assessment of each of these. This epistemological stance is then filtered through the linguistic choices available to the speaker, depending on the language they are speaking. M exemplifies five not necessarily exhaustive types of epistemological stance: personal experience (including private experience and witness), inferential, reportive, factual, and imaginative.

The remainder of the book is the corpus-based study where the choice of epistemological stance is relatively fixed by using narrative retellings; it examines the pragmatics of the linguistic choices made by speakers of Macedonian, Japanese, and English, three languages with quite distinct systems of evidentiality.

Ch. 4 (85–101) gives details of the corpus, speakers, and the ways in which the data were classified. Ch. 5 (103–33) gives the range of forms which were used by speakers of the three languages to indicate that they were retelling the personal narrative of another, focusing particularly on the contrast between extranarrative devices (such as setting up an explicit reportive frame) vs. narrative-internal devices (such as evidential verb and adverbial forms).

Chs. 6 (135–71) and 7 (173–98) form the heart of the book, examining the distribution of the reportive strategies, their frequency, pragmatics, and the speaker’s motivations for the uses of the forms. While Ch. 6 focuses on the global epistemological stance of the retellings in each language, Ch. 7 examines the pragmatics of the variations from the default epistemological stance taken by retellers.

The book concludes with notes, references, two appendices (a synopsis of each personal experience narrative together with the various retelling combinations, and a sample retelling for each language), and language, name, and subject indexes.

As M notes, there have been various crosslinguistic studies of the formal properties of evidential systems and their semantics, but little work has been done on the pragmatics and use of evidential forms in a range of languages. By restricting the data to an easily comparable set, M has been able to convincingly show the crosslinguistic variation that is found in the use of evidential strategies on a single task. This book is a valuable contribution to pragmatic studies in general and is of great value to those of us who work with evidentials from any point of view, showing on a micro-level how speakers can utilize evidentials and evidential strategies...