A dialogue-based theory of evidentiality

The proposed project advocates a dialogue-based approach to defining evidentiality: the linguistic coding of how speakers claim knowledge about events (through seeing/hearing/reasoning/report).

In European languages, such as English and Spanish, evidentiality is not part of grammar and as a result, evidentiality has long been viewed as an ‘exotic’ category. As new evidential systems are being documented, however, this conception has changed.

In order to capture the richness of attested evidential systems we propose that theoretical generalizations concerning this category must be based on the use of evidential forms in spoken language.

The goal of the proposed project is to formulate a coherent, interaction-based theory of evidentiality: one that makes adequate predictions about the systems we encounter, rather than stopping at neatly-structured, ad hoc taxonomies.

To this end, we will use spoken-language corpora (collected by ourselves and ones deposited in language archives) to capture generalizable characteristics of evidential markers and provide analytical support for a cross-linguistically viable definition of evidentiality.

The interaction-based hypotheses will be tested against the distribution and frequencies of evidential forms in the corpora, as well as their diachronic development.

The data will come from languages of the Americas, where both applicants have done extensive fieldwork and grammatical evidentials are frequently attested.