<i>Evidence for Evidentiality</i> is a welcome contribution to the existing knowledge on evidentiality. The book, which covers theoretical and descriptive issues, succeeds in demonstrating that evidentiality is an identifiable category across languages, albeit a complex and elusive one. The analysis of phenomena pertaining to language acquisition, polysemy or meaning extensions attest to the intricate relationship between evidentiality and related categories such as factuality, knowledge and cognition, epistemic and deontic modality, subjectivity, tense and lexical aspect. The book has a wide coverage of evidential markers (including nine languages: six European, two East-Asian and Yurakaré from South America) and of different methods for the study of evidentiality, such as the use of corpus data, reference grammars, historical sources, native speaker intuitions, and experiments. <i>Evidence for Evidentiality</i> is a must for students and academics undertaking research or interested in deepening knowledge in the domain of evidentiality.

- Marta Carretero, Universidad Complutense de Madrid,

All in all, based on a sound empirical footing, this collection offers a springboard for looking into evidentiality from a wider perspective, especially pragmatics, using diverse approaches and methodologies. By doing this, it contributes significantly to the way of pinning down the genre-specific, context-specific even socio-cultural-specific evidential values across languages and thus obtaining a panoramic picture of the complexity of evidentiality.

- Weiqian Liu, Yi'na Wang, Beihang University, Beijing, China, in Journal of Pragmatics 170 (2020),

Statements are always under the threat of the potential counter-question How do you know? To pre-empt this question, language users often indicate what kind of access they had to the communicated content: Their own perception, inference from other information, ‘hearsay’, etc. Such expressions, grammatical or lexical, have been studied in recent years under the cover term of evidentiality research. The present volume contributes 11 new studies to this flourishing field, all exploring evidential phenomena in a range of languages (Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Khalkha Mongolian, Spanish, Tibetan, Yurakaré), using a variety of methodologies. Evidential meaning is discussed in relation to other semantic dimensions, such as epistemic modality, semantic roles, commitment, quotative meaning, and tense. The volume is of interest to scholars and students who are interested in up-to-date methods and frameworks for studying evidential meaning and the various ways it is expressed in the languages of the world.
Les mer

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9789027200952
Publisert
2018-07-19
Utgiver
Vendor
John Benjamins Publishing Co
Vekt
730 gr
Aldersnivå
P, 06
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet