When speakers enter a conversation, they do so with a shared body of information. As the participants in the conversation speak, what they say affects this common ground. But how exactly is the common ground affected by what they assert? On one view, an assertion updates the common ground (Karttunen 1974, Stalnaker 1975, 1978). A second view is that an assertion is a proposal to update the comm...

Current literature offers a range of analyses of evidentials in natural language, which can be broadly grouped into two types: modal analyses (Kratzer 1991, Izvorski 1997, Ehrich 2001, Garrett 2001, Faller 2006, Matthewson et al. 2007, McCready and Asher 2006, McCready and Ogata 2007, Waldie et al. 2009, Peterson 2009, 2010, Lee this volume, among others), and non-modal analyses (Faller 2002, 2...

Abstract While evidential categories have similar meanings and uses cross-linguistically, the names given to tend vary. This article surveys terms for evidentials used in descriptive grammars of 51 languages that at least three categories. Comparing find common terminological tendencies can provide useful insights into descriptions There is great deal term synonymy polysemy, but each category h...