February 19, 2003

Evidentiality

Evidentiality in language: "a repertoire of devices for conveying... various attitudes towards knowledge". Compare:

  1. It's raining
  2. It's probably raining
  3. Maybe it's raining
  4. It must be raining
  5. It sounds/looks/smells like it's raining
  6. It's sort of raining
  7. Actually, it's raining
  8. Yeah, sure it's raining

Note that lack of evidential marking (as in 1) still conveys a message: "I am certain of what I say".

Markers of evidentiality

The types of evidentiality typically marked in English include

Each of these is typically associated with specific lexical and/or grammatical devices. But note that just about any part of the grammatical system may be used to signal evidentiality.

Degree of reliability

Modal auxiliaries: goes before the main verb in a sentence: "She could / might / may come tomorrow"

Adverbs: a word that "modifies" a verb or a whole sentence. They often (but not always) end in "-ly": "She will possibly / probably / certainly / undoubtably come tomorrow."

Hedges: an expression which marks a proposition as "only approximately true".

Belief

Verb of cognition: "I think / guess / suppose it's raining" (or "It's raining, I think/guess/suppose")

Inference

Modal auxiliaries: "You're all wet, it must / has to / 's gotta be raining"

Adverbs: "It's obviously / evidently / apparently raining"; "Maybe / perhaps it's raining"

Adjectives: "It's obvious / evident / apparent that it's raining"

Sensory evidence

Direct perception verb (strong assertion): "I can hear / see / feel / smell it raining"

Indirect perception verb (weak assertion): "It feels / looks / smells / sounds like it's raining".

Expectations

Discourse markers: "Of course / in fact / actually / oddly enough, it's raining". These markers suggest that the proposition is either in line with or opposed to what the speaker thinks the hearer expects to be the case.

Hearsay evidence

Direct quotation: "Joe said, 'it's raining'".

Indirect quotation: "Joe says it's raining", "They say it's raining" -- the speaker gives Joe responsibility for the truth of the statement, without repeating his words.

Verb of reporting: "I hear it's raining", "It's reported to be raining" -- the speaker ascribes responsibility to "unnamed sources".

Formal citation: "Evidentiality has been shown to be pervasive in English (Chafe 1986 p.261)".

Newspaper story

Attempted murder charge to be filed

Baby improves; mother awaits arraignment

The mother suspected of discarding her newborn atop an overflowing garbage can outside the Santa Maria house she shared with about 30 other people is to be arraigned today on an attempted murder charge.

Juana Santo Orocio, 23, was arrested late Wednesday afternoon on suspicion of child abandonment and neglect.

But by Wednesday night, detectives said they had generated enough evidence to book her on the additional charge of attempted murder.

The condition of the 4-pound, 3½-ounce boy was upgraded to good Thursday afternoon. He will remain in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit of Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital until he is well enough to be placed in a temporary home.

Hospital staff already has received numerous inquiries from residents who want to adopt the infant, but are referring them to the county's Department of Child Welfare Services.

The woman apparently came to Santa Maria from Mexico with at least one brother and an uncle to pick strawberries a couple of months ago. Because she is apparently here illegally, authorities say, Orocio will likely face deportation after the criminal proceedings.

Authorities say those living in the house claim they didn't know she was giving birth, or even pregnant. But investigators say they find that difficult to believe with so many people living there.

Orocio is accused of wrapping her son in a plastic bag and disposing of him shortly after he was born early Wednesday.

"The additional charge of attempted murder is based on information we received from witnesses," said Santa Maria police Cmdr. Dave Stern.

"It also has a lot to do with the way the child was wrapped up in the plastic bag and disposed of in the trash can. The end result of that action is pretty obvious."

Data from a scholarly article

From Ellen Contini-Morava, Noun Classification in Swahili

Among systems of linguistic categorization, noun class systems (including systems of grammatical gender, as in German or Arabic) are usually defined as follows:

(a) all nouns in the language are divided into a small and closed set of classes, signalled by inflectional morphology;

(b) the class of a noun is obligatorily co-referenced on other elements in the sentence via grammatical agreement (see e.g. Dixon 1982; Craig 1986).

The phenomenon of noun classification has long been of interest to linguists and anthropologists because understanding the basis for grouping nouns together as members of a class hints at a system of cognitive or cultural classification underlying the system of linguistic classification. However, the question what, if any, semantic principles can explain the groupings of nouns into classes in Bantu languages has been controversial. The received wisdom is that although some generalizations can be made, there is a lot of arbitrariness in these systems. In this paper I will suggest that the diagnosis of arbitriness rests on an overly restrictive definition of what `semantic coherence' means, and that a cognitive-semantic approach reveals more systematicity than might appear at first.

This paper is a report on research in progress on the semantics and syntax of the noun class system of Swahili.