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This volume offers a systematic crosslinguistic account of evidentiality, the linguistic encoding of the source of information on which a statement is based. It explores a range of topics relating to evidentiality and provides case studies from a variety of language families as diverse as Algonquian, Korean, and Uralic.
List of contents
- 1: Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald: Evidentiality: The framework
- Part I: Evidentiality: Its Expression, Scope, and History
- 2: Jackson T.-S. Sun: Evidentials and person
- 3: Diana Forker: Evidentiality and its relations with other verbal categories
- 4: Björn Wiemer: Evidentials and epistemic modality
- 5: Guillaume Jacques: Non-propositional evidentiality
- 6: Victor Friedman: Where do evidentials come from?
- 7: Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald: Evidentiality and language contact
- Part II: Evidentials in Cognition, Communication, and Society
- 8: Ercenür Ünal and Anna Papafragou: Evidentials, information sources, and cognition
- 9: Stanka Fitneva: The acquisition of evidentiality
- 10: Janis Nuckolls: The interactional and cultural pragmatics of evidentiality in Pastaza Quichua
- 11: Rosaleen Howard: Evidence and evidentiality in Quechua narrative discourse
- 12: Michael Wood: Stereotypes and evidentiality
- Part III: Evidentiality and Information Sources: Further Issues and Approaches
- 13: Kasper Boye: Evidentiality: The notion and the term
- 14: Mario Squartini: Extragrammatical expression of information source
- 15: Margaret Speas: Evidentiality and formal semantic theories
- Part IV: Evidentiality across the World
- 16: Eithne B. Carlin: Evidentiality and the Cariban languages
- 17: David Eberhard: Evidentiality in Nambikwara languages
- 18: Kristine Stenzel and Elsa Gomez-Imbert: Evidentiality in Tukanoan languages
- 19: Katarzyna I. Wojtylak: Evidentiality in Bora and Witotoan languages
- 20: Tim Thornes: Evidentiality in the Uto-Aztecan languages
- 21: Marie-Odile Junker, Conor M. Quinn, and J. Randolph Valentine: Evidentiality in Algonquian
- 22: Tyler Peterson: Evidentiality and epistemic modality in Gitksan
- 23: Diana Forker: Evidentiality in Nakh-Daghestanian languages
- 24: Lars Johanson: Turkic indirectivity
- 25: Elena Skribnik and Petar Kehayov: Evidentials in Uralic languages
- 26: Benjamin Brosig and Elena Skribnik: Evidentiality in Mongolic
- 27: Scott DeLancey: Evidentiality in Tibetic
- 28: Gwendolyn Hyslop: Evidentiality in Bodic languages
- 29: Anne Storch: Evidentiality and the expression of knowledge: An African perspective
- 30: Hannah Sarvasy: Evidentiality in the languages of New Guinea
- 31: Chia-jung Pan: Evidentiality in Formosan languages
- 32: Josephine S. Daguman: Reportatives in the languages of the Philippines
- 33: Ho-min Sohn: Evidentiality in Korean
- 34: Heiko Narrog and Wenjiang Yang: Evidentiality in Japanese
- 35: Asier Alcázar: Dizque and other emergent evidential forms in Romance languages
- 36: Sherman Wilcox and Barbara Shaffer: Evidentiality and information source in signed languages
About the author
Aikhenvald is a major authority on languages of the Arawak family, from northern Amazonia, and has written grammars of Bare (1995) and Warekena (1998), plus A Grammar of Tariana, from Northwest Amazonia (CUP, 2003), and The Manambu language of East Sepik, Papua New Guinea (OUP, 2008) in addition to essays on various typological and areal topics, and numerous edited volumes. Her other major publications include Evidentiality (OUP, 2004), Imperatives and Commands (OUP, 2010), Languages of the Amazon (OUP, 2012), The Art of Grammar (OUP, 2014), How gender shapes the world (OUP, 2016), Serial verbs (OUP, 2018), The web of knowledge: evidentiality at the cross-roads (Brill, 2021), I saw the dog: how language works (Profile Books, 2021), and A guide to gender and classifiers (OUP, forthcoming).
Summary
The Oxford Handbook of Evidentiality offers a thorough, systematic, and crosslinguistic account of evidentiality, the linguistic encoding of the source of information on which a statement is based. In some languages, the speaker always has to specify this source - for example whether they saw the event, heard it, inferred it based on visual evidence or common sense, or was told about it by someone else. While not all languages have obligatory marking of this type, every language has ways of referring to information source and associated epistemological meanings. The continuum of epistemological expressions covers a range of devices from the lexical means in familiar European languages and in many languages of Aboriginal Australia to the highly grammaticalized systems in Amazonia or North America. In this handbook, experts from a variety of fields explore topics such as the relationship between evidentials and epistemic modality, contact-induced changes in evidential systems, the acquisition of evidentials, and formal semantic theories of evidentiality. The Oxford Handbook of Evidentiality also contains detailed case studies of evidentiality in language families across the world, including Algonquian, Korean, Nakh-Dagestanian, Nambikwara, Turkic, Uralic, and Uto-Aztecan.
Additional text
The most important current resource for anyone interested in the nature and typology of evidentials.
