Evidentials are grammatical source-of-knowledge markers. In Bulgarian they provide information about authorship--whether the speaker has personally acquired the information or not--and modality--whether perceptual or cognitive mechanisms were involved in the information's generation. In two experiments, Bulgarian kindergarteners and third-graders (ages 6 and 9, N=96) had to decide which one of ...

This talk reports on a joint project with Norry Ogata on the semantics of Japanese evidentials. Until recently, evidential expressions have not received much attention in the (formal) semantic literature. This situation has changed in the last few years; influential work by Izvorski (1997) and Faller (2002), for instance, has inspired a good deal of work. The consensus at this point seems to be...

This paper deals with the semantics of the Evidential marker in Northern Ostyak. As far as I know, the semantics of grammaticalized Evidentials has not been studied in detail for the (eastern) Uralic languages, although in the modal system of some of them the Evidential category plays an important role. I will analyze the different meanings of the Ostyak Evidentials, and suggest that the appare...

In some languages, every declarative sentence includes a morpheme specifying the speaker’s evidence or source of information. This article provides an overview of the central theoretical questions addressed in recent research on Evidential morphemes. First, I discuss the question of whether Evidentials constitute a coherent closed-class system, independent of other systems of grammar. Next, I b...

We show in this paper that some expressions indicating source of evidence are part of propositional content and are best analyzed as a special kind of epistemic modal. Our evidence comes from the Japanese evidential system. We consider six evidentials in Japanese, showing that they can be embedded in conditionals and under modals and that their properties with respect to modal subordination are...

This paper discusses the meaning of the Bulgarian and Turkish evidentials. I argue that evidential forms in these languages have a rich semantic content: they encode the source of information, epistemic modality, and temporality. Ultimately, I show that the meaning of the Bulgarian and Turkish evidentials is not reducible to the meaning of perfect forms, from which the evidential forms are hist...

Children's ability to exercise selective trust is crucial for the development of their knowledge and successful socialization. For speakers of some languages, evidentials, which are grammatical source-of-knowledge markers, could provide valuable support of these processes. Focusing on Bulgarian, this chapter situates children's use of evidentials in reliability judgments within the broader cont...

The goal of this paper is to investigate the linguistic, psychological and cognitive properties of utterances that express the surprise of the speaker, with a focus on how grammatical evidentials are used for this purpose. This is often labeled in the linguistics literature as mirativity. While there has been a flurry of recent interest in mirativity, we still lack an understanding of how and w...

Abstract The paper provides evidence against the claim that perceptual access is commonly encoded in direct evidentials. While visual, auditory, tactile and olfactory perception are conveyed by evidentials contexts where such interpretations appropriate, others it speaker’s involvement, affectedness established beliefs which conveyed. These may be exclusive to speaker or shared addressee. Inste...

The notion of evidence is mostly taken for granted in the study of evidentials. This paper reports on the initial stage of a research program that attempts to determine what properties are necessary for a proposition to count as ‘evidence for evidentials.’ The conclusion of this initial paper is that such evidence must be knowledge, on the basis of application of skeptical arguments, which can ...