Feature GB322: Is there grammatical marking of direct evidence (perceived with the senses)?

Patrons: Hannah J. Haynie

Description ⇫

Summary

This question is concerned with the marking of evidentiality related to the speaker’s direct sensory evidence for some event or action. Grammatical marking of evidentials involves the use of grammaticalized markers such as affixes or other morphology, evidential particles, or evidential auxiliary verbs to convey the evidential meaning. Grammatical marking contrasts with constructions that express this meaning by means of adverbs (e.g. John apparently ate the cake) or lexical verbs in multi-clausal constructions (e.g. I saw that John had eaten the cake). Visual evidence is a common form of information encoded with a direct evidential, however direct evidentiality may also include auditory or other non-visual categories of sensory evidence. This question should be coded 1 if the language has a single direct evidential or any number of sensory evidentials.

Procedure

  1. If the language has one or more grammatical marker(s) (affixes, other morphological markers, particles, auxiliaries) dedicated to expressing that the speaker has direct sensory evidence (e.g. visual) of an event or action, code 1.
  2. If the language does not use a grammatical marker to indicate that the speaker has direct sensory evidence of an event or action, code 0.
  3. If the language expresses direct evidence of an event or action only through the use of adverbs or lexical verbs, code 0.

Examples

Eastern Pomo (ISO 639-3: peb, Glottolog: east2545)

"-ink’e The non-visual evidential indicates that the basis for the statement made is evidence arrived at through the speaker’s personal perception using a sense other than sight" (McLendon 1975: 98).

a. c’éc’e-nk’e
something.sticks-SENS
‘I feel something sticking me.’
(McLendon 1975: 99; glosses based on McLendon 2003)

b. ki·yá·t’a Ɂéč-ink’e?
who       sneeze-SENS
‘Who sneezed?’ (the speaker heard the sneeze but does not know who did the sneezing)
(McLendon 1975: 99; glosses based on McLendon 2003)

Eastern Pomo is coded as 1 for this feature.

Further reading

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2004. Evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chafe, William & Johanna Nichols (eds). 1986. Evidentiality: The linguistic encoding of epistemology. New York: Ablex Publishing.

References

McLendon, Sally. 1975. A grammar of Eastern Pomo. (University of California Publications in Linguistics, 74.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

McLendon, Sally. 2003. A brief word list of Eastern Pomo. Ms.


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