30.1346, Review: Cognitive Science; Discourse Analysis; Linguistic Theories; Pragmatics; Semantics: Foolen, de Hoop, Mulder (2018)
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Subject: 30.1346, Review: Cognitive Science; Discourse Analysis; Linguistic Theories; Pragmatics; Semantics: Foolen, de Hoop, Mulder (2018)
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Date: Tue, 26 Mar 2019 12:23:25
From: Marta Donazzan [Marta.donazzan at univ-Nantes.fr]
Subject: Evidence for Evidentiality
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36472337
Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/29/29-3468.html
EDITOR: Ad Foolen
EDITOR: Helen de Hoop
EDITOR: Gijs Mulder
TITLE: Evidence for Evidentiality
SERIES TITLE: Human Cognitive Processing 61
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2018
REVIEWER: Marta Donazzan, Laboratoire de Linguistique de Nantes (UMR 6310)
SUMMARY
The book “Evidence for Evidentiality” is centered around the definition of the
notion of evidentiality and on the empirical arguments supporting it. The
chapters collected in the volume are updated and elaborated versions of talks
presented at a thematic workshop on Empirical Evidence for Evidentiality held
in Nijmegen in 2014.
Evidentiality may be defined as the linguistic encoding of the speaker’s
information source for a given statement. Two issues immediately arise from
this definition. Since statements encode propositions, one may wonder what the
relation is between the marking of evidentiality, which has the function of
making the speaker’s commitment explicit, and epistemic modality, which is
traditionally considered as a way of encoding the speaker’s knowledge. The
first part of the book addresses this issue under the heading of the question
“What do we know?”, and comprises contributions investigating the relation
between evidence and knowledge from both the speaker’s and the hearer’s
perspective.
The contribution by Henrik Bergqvist, “Evidentiality as a stance: event types
and speaker roles”, serves as an introductory chapter outlining the relation
between evidentiality and epistemic modality. Casting his analysis in a
referential theory of evidentiality, the author makes a point for the autonomy
of evidentials from modals. Related issues are explored in the following
chapters, which rather focus on empirical cases.
Benjamin Brosig, in his paper “Factual vs. evidential? The past tense forms
of Khalkha Mongolian” explores the relation between evidential marking and
tense-aspectual marking in a set of inflectional elements of the Mongolian
verb. Starting from a large corpus of spontaneous speech, Brosig elicited the
interpretation of three evidential morphemes that are typically used in past
tense, and draws a descriptive generalisation of their respective meaning that
is based on the two variables of established/non established knowledge and
direct/indirect evidence.
Two closely related studies are presented by Helen de Hoop et al (“I think and
I believe: evidential expressions in Dutch”) and Gijs Mulder (“Yo creo que as
a marker of evidentiality and epistemic modality”). The authors are dealing
with the description and analysis of the evidential interpretation of
expressions such as “I believe” and “I think” in, respectively, Dutch and
peninsular Spanish, and draw their data from corpora based on Twitter
conversations. Although these expressions can all be considered as
instantiations of inferential evidentiality in the languages under study, they
show an interesting degree of differentiation as well. De Hoop et al. show
that the Dutch expressions for “I think” and “I believe” (“ik denk” and “ik
geloof”, respectively) do not show the same distribution, and they conclude
that, while “I think” is an activity verb selecting an agentive external
argument, “I believe” behaves as a psychological verb, which requires an
experiencer subject. As a consequence, the type of evidence evoked by “I
believe” is less inferential, and more impressionistic, than the one implied
by the use of “I think”. Spanish “believe”-evidential offers yet another case.
Mulder argues that, while it may be analysed as a case of inferential
evidential, “yo creo que”, in its formulaic pattern, may also express other
non-literal readings besides evidentiality, a datum that the author takes as a
possible sign of its grammaticalization in the language.
Minna Jaakola’s “Finnish evidential adverbs in argumentative texts” closes the
first section of the book. This study deals with non-inflectional evidential
expressions in Finnish, namely the adverbs derived from the Finnish verb
tietää “know”, which are examined in a specific register, that of reader’s
comments on online newspapers. The choice of investigating this restricted
corpus enables the author to focus on the epistemic access to knowledge and
its various meaning types.
The second issue that appears to be central to current debate in the
linguistic community has to do with the very definition of evidentiality as an
autonomous linguistic category. The debate, which is evoked also by the
authors in various places, can be summarized as follows. As a grammatical
category, evidentiality should be defined by dedicated linguistic means of
expression, such as “inflections, clitics or other free syntactic elements”
(Anderson 1986) that have evidentiality as their core meaning. Linguists
committing to this view, then, tend to draw a sharp line between grammatical
evidentiality and other linguistic means that languages employ to “describe
different types of knowledge and of information source” (Aikhenvald 2004).
According to this view, not all languages can be said to have evidential
markers. A different stance is taken by scholars that prefer to insist on
evidentiality rather being a notional category, such as Modality or Aspect.
Encompassing a direct reference to notions such as source of information and
evidence, the category of evidentiality is indeed brought closer to modality
as a kind of “epistemic justification” (Boye 2012). Following this point of
view, of course, evidentiality is independent from the grammaticalisation of
evidentials, and should rather be considered as a linguistic universal. By
answering the question “When do we know?”, the second part of the book
addresses these important issues.
The different contributions gathered in this section investigate the
acquisition of evidentiality (cf. Tamm et al. study on the acquisition of
evidential interpretations in Estonian) and the extensions of evidential
meanings in the diachronic development of grammatical markers. Two papers in
particular address the latter issue by considering two typologically unrelated
languages. Bettina Zeisler (“Evidence for the development of evidentiality as
a grammatical category in the Tibetic languages”) compares the grammar of
Classic Tibetan and Modern Tibetic languages, showing that, while the former
lacks a fully developed evidential system, the coding of evidentiality seems
to have gradually become grammaticalized in modern varieties. The case in
point is the grammaticalisation of the evidential verb “hdug” in West Tibetan.
Ziesler reconstructs the grammaticalisation path through which its original
existential meaning, expressing a transitory state, has developed into an
evidential, where the transitory notion has been exploited for the expression
of doubt and inference, and has further specialised itself to apply to
situations merely perceived, where the inference of a perceiver becomes
essential in order to ground their assertion. While Ziegler could base her
diachronic analysis on a well-documented corpus of written texts, spanning
from Early Classical Tibetan to Early Modern Tibetan, Sonia Gipper, in her
contribution, “From similarity to evidentiality”, takes the opposite path.
Gipper starts from the synchronic use of the polyfunctional verbalizing suffix
–shi in the Amazonian language Yukaré and reconstructs a possible diachronic
path of semantic extension from an original derivational suffix expressing
similarity. As in Modern Tibetan languages, the meaning of an evidential is
thus the result of a process of semantic extension, which in Yukaré is however
not fully accomplished, since the same suffix –shi still retains, in
synchrony, a use as a comparative morpheme.
Finally, the issue of grammaticalisation is evoked also by Jeroen
Vanderbiesen, who draws an analysis of the so-called reportive use of German
modal auxiliary “sollen” in terms of evidentiality (“Reportive “sollen” in an
exclusively functional view of evidentiality”). The auxiliary “sollen” in
German has been described in the literature as having a non-primary evidential
meaning, undergoing an “evidentiality strategy” by which a marker that does
not encode evidential information as its intrinsic meaning may acquire a
semantic extension that allows it to deal with evaluating information sources
(Aikhenvald 2004). In the case of “sollen”, an analysis in terms of semantic
extension should be supported by considerations about the status of modals in
German, as it is well known that modal auxiliaries across languages may sit at
various stages along a path of grammaticalisation into lexical verbs. On the
theoretical side, Vanderbiesen argues against the “narrow” view of
evidentiality expounded above and adopts a definition of evidentiality as a
“functional-conceptual substance domain” (Boye and Harder 2009). Within this
framework, he analyses sollen. in some of its uses, as a reportive evidential
marker, which signals that the speaker backs her assertion with verbal
testimony. He further notes that, since “sollen” is primarily used as a
deontic modal in German, its evidential use squares with the tendency observed
across European languages, where evidentiality is often marked through deontic
modals.
Modal auxiliaries, however, are not the only grammatical devices exploited for
expressing evidential meaning in the languages of Europe. Alda Mari’s
analysis of the evidential interpretation of the future Tense in French (“The
French future: evidentiality and incremental information”) tackles the issue
of the modal contribution of future tenses. The debate around the
indeterminacy of statements projected in the future dates back at least to
Aristoteles. Without taking stance with respect to the issue of the
theoretical interpretation of the future, and of the type of indeterminacy
(metaphysical or epistemic) that future tenses may encode, Mari presents
evidence supporting the claim that the French future contributes modality, and
that “the specific type of modality that it contributes imposes that the
context of the modal evaluation satisfy specific evidential constraints”
(Mari, op.cit., p. 201). This type of modality, which Mari dubs
“ratificational” or “verificational”, rests upon the evidence that the speaker
has at the time of utterance, and has to be distinguished from the
“conjectural” modality, which does not require an event of verification. The
author is then able to propose a compositional analysis of the meaning of
French future, whereby the Tense component contributes a temporal constraint,
shifting the time of evaluation of the modal component forward with respect to
utterance time. Therefore, the French future conveys that the speaker will use
evidence at a time following the utterance time.
The final chapter, by Seppo Kittilä, Lotta Java and Erika Sandman, addresses a
methodological question, namely the choice of data and their contribution to
the understanding of the phenomenon under study (“What can different types of
data teach us on evidentiality?”) The issue of the empirical base is of course
a relevant one for both theoretical and descriptive linguistics, and even more
so in the case of a phenomenon such as evidentiality, which often needs the
setting of a rich context in order to be expressed and which takes a range of
different (more or less grammatical) forms across languages. The consequence
is that evidentiality can be studied from a variety of perspectives, which
imply a variety of types of data, ranging from elicited examples, such as the
ones that can be collected in fieldwork, to spontaneous written or oral
corpora and questionnaires. In their contribution, the authors review the
advantages and shortcomings of each type of data, and conclude that all of
them are useful in order to reach a full understanding of evidentiality as a
category, since they differ in their contribution and finally complement each
other.
EVALUATION
Evidence for Evidentiality is a welcome contribution because, with a wide
range of descriptive, acquisitional and diachronic data, it feeds the
theoretical discussion around the relatively young linguistic category of
evidentiality, thereby contributing to its definition and understanding. While
the focus of the book still lies in the discussion of empirical evidence for
the grammatical category of evidentiality, the editors also succeeded in
addressing a number of important theoretical issues, thereby contributing to
the identification of the notional category underlying the grammaticalization
of evidential markers. As such, this book may be useful for both typologists
interested in the description of the grammatical categories of individual
languages and semanticians attempting a subtle classification of the
categories of meaning.
REFERENCES
Aikhenvald, A. (2004) ‘Evidentiality’. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Anderson, L.B. (1986) ‘Evidentials, paths of change and mental maps:
typologically regular asymmetries’. In W. Chafe and J. Nichols (eds)
‘Evidentiality: the linguistic coding of epistemology’ (273-312) New Jersey:
Ablex
Boye, K. (2012) ‘Epistemic meaning: a crosslinguistic and functional-cognitive
study’. Berlin/Boston: Mouton de Gruyter
Boye, K. and P. Harder (2009) ‘Evidentiality. Linguistic categories and
grammaticalization’. Functions of Language 16(1), 9-43
Cornille, B. (2009) ‘Evidentiality and epistemic modality. On the close
relationship between two different categories’. Functions of Language 16,
44-62
Plungian, V (2001) ‘The place of evidentiality within the universal
grammatical space’. Journal of Pragmatics 33, 383-400
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Marta Donazzan is associate professor of Linguistics at the English Department
of the University of Nantes. Her main area of research is the formal analysis
of natural language semantics at its interface with syntax and pragmatics.
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