The collection of papers in the present volume represents the convergence of two research communities who had the common goal of exploring the formal basis of evidentiality. In the fall of 2007, a research seminar focusing on the cross-linguistic typology of evidentials was held at UBC. In the spring of 2008, GLOW hosted a workshop on the semantics evidentials whose broad goal of the workshop w...

Evidentiality is the linguistic representation of the nature of evidence for a statement. In other words, it is the linguistically encoded evidence for the trustworthiness of a statement. In this paper, we aim to explore how linguistically encoded information of evidentiality can contribute to the prediction of trustworthiness in natural language processing (NLP). We propose to incorporate evid...

Many languages show systematic marking for evidentiality, indicating the source of a speaker’s information, the modality by which that information was gained, and the speaker’s stance towards the veracity of the information. Among the meanings expressed through such markings are quotativity, distance, reportedness, surprise, eyevs. ear-witness, and in general any sort of “mediation” by the spea...

This paper addresses the question of whether the presence of grammatical category evidentiality in language, traditionally defined as an expression of information source, affects cognitive performance. Our research paradigm bridges together two theoretical perspectives from linguistics and cognitive psychology: (i) the position that evidentiality encodes epistemic commitment, specifically, that...

This paper is concerned with the acquisition of the semantics and pragmatics of evidentiality. Evidentiality markers encode the speaker’s source for the information being reported in the utterance. While languages like English express evidentiality in lexical markers (I saw that it was raining vs. I heard that it was raining), other languages grammaticalize evidentiality. In Turkish, for all in...

This paper investigates six- to nine-year-old children's acquisition of evidentiality. In two minimally different tasks we assess whether children can be made to use a particular source of information by presenting them with a specific evidential term. That is, we assess whether children have an explicit awareness of the source requirement of the evidential terms. The results demonstrate that c...

this paper aims at investigating evidentiality in contemporary persian from a typological point of view. first the category of evidentiality and its types in the languages of the world is introduced. gathering and analysing data of spoken and written form of this language as well as classic texts,  an attempt was made to see whether evidentiality exists in this language as a grammatical categor...

Evidentiality is a linguistic category that specifies the source of information conveyed in an utterance (Aikhenvald and Dixon 2003), such as direct observation, inference, or hearsay. According to Aikhenvald’s (2004) cross-linguistic study of over 500 languages, a typologically common pattern is to specify distinct sources of information with distinct morphemes, such as Quechua’s three evident...

The use of evidential and epistemic marking as a rhetorical strategy has received little attention in the literature. Speakers often make judgments on the basis of perceptual, reported, or inferred evidence, thus the relationship between epistemicity and evidentiality is often close and difficult to demarcate. However, whereas epistemicity involves the speaker’s or writer’s evaluation, judgment...

This study presents pioneering data on how adult early bilinguals (heritage speakers) and late bilingual speakers of Turkish and German process grammatical evidentiality in a visual world setting in comparison to monolingual speakers of Turkish. Turkish marks evidentiality, the linguistic reference to information source, through inflectional affixes signaling either direct (-DI) or indirect (-m...