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ELSEVIER 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 sub-
domains; (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-me-

bread' 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-be-
bread', or, vaguely and timelessly, 'according-to-my-experi-
ence-be bread'" (Lee, 1959: 137).

The quotation above illustrates a phenomenon linguists have come to call eviden-
tiality. 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: pdendale@uia.ua.ac.be; pdendale@zeus.univ-metz.fr; tasmo@uia.ua.ac.be

0378-2166/01/$ - see front matter © 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
PII: S0378-2166(00)00005-9
340 P. Dendale, L. Tasmowski / Journal of Pragmatics 33 (2001) 339-348

establishedresearch topic in linguistics. The first milestone was a conference orga-

nized in Berkeley in 1981, billed by the organizers as the "first conference ever assem-
bled to compare evidentiality in a variety of languages". The proceedings were even-
tually 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 lin-
guistic markers encoding these two semantic domains are often the same. This hap-
pens 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~di-
atifwas 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 legiti-
mate place in the French-speaking linguistic community.
 P. Dendale, L. Tasmowski / Journal of Pragmatics 33 (2001) 339-348 341

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 subcate-
gories. 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 mani-
fested.

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 interrela-
tionships 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 eviden-
tiality and modality. In general, there is no one-to-one relation between evidential-
ity/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).
 342 P. Dendale, L. Tasmowski / Journal of Pragmatics 33 (200l) 339-348

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 litera-
ture 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 infor-
mation." 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 modal-
ity 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 some-
what 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 fea-
ture" (1986: 7). 4 The relation of inclusion between notions of evidentiality and modal-
ity 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 epis-
temic attitude towards the information, or - as in Jan Nuyts' contribution to this vol-
ume - 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 epis-
temic 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 co-
hyponym. 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.
 P. Dendale, L. Tasmowski / Journal of Pragmatics 33 (2001) 339-348 343

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 seman-
tic domain of evidentiality in the narrow sense (see later). A summary is found in
Willett (1988: 57), from which Fig. 1 is taken6:

Visual
Direct - Attested Auditory
Other sensory

Types of Secondhand } (hear-

Evidence Reported Thirdhand say)
Folklore
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 the source of information

- specification of the degree of precision or truth or appropriateness of a category
label
- specification of the probability of the truth
- specification of 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 atti-
tude: 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.
344 P. Dendale, L. Tasmowski /Journal of Pragmatics 33 (2001) 339-348

"... all languages have means of qualifying [...] the origin of the information; however, not all lan-
guages 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 evi-
dential and mediative are genuine grammatical categories and elucidating the crite-
ria 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 gram-
matical category by Lazard (this volume). Evidentiality has been viewed in the same
way by some scholars. Others, however, have argued against this view - for exam-
ple, 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 eviden-
tiality, which he reduces to a kind of subcategory.
Lazard (this volume) uses two criteria to assign a particular form the status of evi-
dential 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 parti-
cles 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 evi-
dentials (1986: 274). But this is quite in contrast to Lazard, who claims that eviden-
tiality has not been grammaticalized at all in English.
Lazard's second criterion confronts us with the problem of dealing with polyse-
mous 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".
 P. Dendale, L. Tasmowski / Journal of Pragmatics 33 (2001) 339-348 345

- 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 evidential-
ity (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 informa-
tion' value clearly predominates) is appropriate. Is the simple presence of a single
particular meaning related to the semantic domain of source of information (evi-
dentiality 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 informa-
tion to a third party (= evidentiality), (2) uncertainty of the information (= modal-
ity) and (3) non-commitment of the speaker regarding the information (cf. Den-
dale, 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 superordi-
nate 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, pol-
ysemous, or homonymous. Hence, in translating a polysemous marker from lan-
guage 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 pol-
ysemy. 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 exis-
tence 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’ evi-
dence. 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-linguis-
tic 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-of-
information and markers of degrees of certainty, and concludes that epistemic mark-
ing 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.
 P, Dendale, L. Tasmowski / Journal of Pragmatics 33 (2001) 339-348 347

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348 P. Dcndule, L. Tasmowski i Journal of Pragmatics 33 (2001) 339-348

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 research-
groups ‘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
jbuyaise). He is currently editing readers on the French conditionnel (with Liliane Tasmowski) and on
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 pubhca-
tions 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 gen-
eral 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 Rein-
heimer), Paris, L’Harmattan, 1997 and a reader on Le conditionncl, co-edited with Patrick Dendale (to
appear at Metz, Klincksieck, 2000).