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ELSEVIER Journal of Pragmatics 33 (2001) 359-367 www.elsevier.nl/locate/pragma

On the grammaticalization of evidentiality"

Gilbert Lazard*
49 avenue de I'Observatoire, F-75014 Paris, France

Abstract
This paper discusses the conditions for the grammaticalization of evidentiality in different languages, with special attention to the languages of South Eastern Europe and the Middle East. In these languages, evidentially marked discourse is opposed to neutral discourse, while in some other languages, evidential markers are necessarily included in every verb form; and in others, evidentiality is only lexically expressed. The last section deals with the problem of cross-language comparisons of evidential systems. A few thoughts are presented on the question of how to build a set of concepts to be used as a tertium comparationis. 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Comparison; Evidential; Grammaticalization; Mediative; Typology

I. Introduction
T h e aim o f this p a p e r is to e m p h a s i z e the specificity o f g r a m m a t i c a l categories in contradistinction to p u r e l y conceptual c a t e g o r i e s and, as an illustration o f this idea, to present a n e w analysis o f the value o f evidentials in B a l k a n and M i d d l e Eastern languages. I have also introduced s o m e thoughts on the prerequisites for cross-lang u a g e c o m p a r i s o n o f that part o f g r a m m a t i c a l systems w h i c h deals with evidentiality, inspired by the suggestive reflections and p r o p o s a l s m a d e b y P l u n g i a n (this volume).

This paper was originally a contribution to the round table on evidentiality at the Sixth International Pragmatics Conference. At the time the round table was being prepared, the publication of its proceedings was not yet considered. It so happened that, about the same time, I wrote an article on the same topic for the journal Linguistic Typology. Since what is said concerning the different types of grammaticalization of evidentiality (section 2) and the value of evidentials in Balkan and Middle Eastern languages (section 3) is similar to what I described in more detail in the LT article, I have made it very short here, and the reader is requested to refer to that article (Lazard, 1999). * E-mail: gilzard@wanadoo.fi" 0378-2166/01/$ - see front matter 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PlI: S0378-2166(00)00008-4

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2. Types of grammaticalization
A grammatical category, like any linguistic unit, has a signifiant and a signif~. The evidential may be said to be grammaticalized in a language when, in the grammatical system of this language, there are specific forms (signifiant) whose semantic-pragmatic content (signifhx) is basically a reference to the source of the information conveyed by the discourse. Although all languages have means of qualifying utterances by introducing references to the origin of information, not all languages have an evidential grammatical category. English and French, for example, have no morphological evidential in their verb system. Evidential meanings are rendered by means of such expressions as 'it seems', 'as it appears', 'as I see', 'as I have heard', 'it is said', 'reportedly', etc. Such expressions are part of the lexicon. In such languages, evidentiality has not been grammaticalized. It is also possible that evidential meanings are not conveyed by specific forms, but occasionally expressed by forms whose central meaning is something else. The perfect may often have such uses. This verb form, the central value of which is to denote a past situation that keeps some relevance in the present, may, in appropriate contexts, take on evidential meaning. Such is the case, for instance, in Eastern Armenian. While Western Armenian has developed a special set of evidential forms derived from the perfect (Donab6dian, 1996, this volume), in Eastern Armenian, the perfect keeps its traditional uses but may also express evidentiality (Kozintseva, 1995). It can be said that such languages are on the way to grammaticalizing evidentiality, but they do not yet possess a grammatical evidential category. On the other hand, there are languages in which every verb form bears a morpheme referring to the source of information. Tuyuca is such a language: "The independent verb in Tuyuca is minimally composed of a verb root and an evidential" (Barnes, 1984: 256). This morpheme indicates whether the speaker has personally seen the situation, has perceived it by hearing or some other sense, infers it from evidence, has learned it from other people, or deems it reasonable to assume it. In the system of such languages, the evidential has a position similar to that of tense, aspect, and mood in our familiar languages, for, like these categories, it is tightly associated with predication and is integrated into the most central part of the verb system. Commenting on related phenomena in Wintu, Schlichter (1986: 58) goes so far as to state that, in a language that has evidentials and aspect but no tense, "evidential deixis is an alternative to the temporal orientation of 'Western' civilization". Most languages spoken in South Eastern Europe and Western Asia (e.g., Albanian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Western Armenian, Persian, etc.) also have an evidential grammatical category, but under other conditions. All these languages have sets of verb forms, derived from the perfect, which form an evidential register in opposition to the neutral register. The speaker may thus choose between the evidential register, which is functionally marked, and the neutral register, which is unmarked and indicates nothing concerning the source of the information. The latter does not imply anything as to whether the speaker has witnessed the fact, knows it by hearsay or inference, or has come to know it in some other indirect way. This freedom of the

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speaker makes such languages clearly different from languages of the Tuyuca type, in which the speaker must use an evidential in each utterance and can choose only between different evidentials.

3. The 'mediative' system

3.1. In Balkan and Middle Eastern languages, the evidential has three main uses:

hearsay, inference, and the so-called 'mirative' or 'admirative'. In other words, it may be used to refer to sayings of other people, to inferences drawn from the evidence of traces of events, or to perceptions of unexpected events at the very moment of speaking. The first two values are well known. I would only like to quote an example of the third. Since Persian is rarely cited among languages possessing the evidential category, I will choose my example from dialectal Tajik, a local variety of Persian spoken in Central Asia. The speaker reaches into his pocket, is surprised to find it empty, and says:

(1) pul-am

na-bud-ay money-CLIT: 1SG NEG-be-EV:3SG 'I have no money (as I see)'

Similar examples might easily be found in Armenian, Turkish, Bulgarian, Albanian, and elsewhere outside the area I am considering (cf. Michailovsky, 1996, for Nepali; DeLancey, 1997: 3 8 4 0 , for the Amerindian language Hare, etc.). Since the three uses - hearsay, inference, and mirative - are found as subcategories of the same category in a number of languages belonging to different families and spoken in different parts of the world, their association cannot be fortuitous: they must have something in common. At first sight, this association seems surprising. It has been claimed that the evidential verb forms which convey these three meanings basically indicate that the speaker has only indirect knowledge derived from what others have said or from reasoning about or interpreting traces of past events. On the other hand, the ordinary, unmarked forms are said to indicate that the speaker's knowledge is acquired by personal perception. But this does not explain the mirative use, which implies knowledge based on the immediate personal perception of events. For this reason, Slobin and Aksu (1982), and also, as far as I can see, DeLancey (1997) claim that the common feature of the three uses is that, in pointing to new, unassimilated knowledge, they all suggest that "the speaker feels distanced from the situation he is describing" (Slobin and Aksu, 1982: 198). I am not sure exactly what those authors mean by 'unassimilated knowledge', but it is clear that knowledge acquired by hearsay, unlike the mirative, is usually not new at the time it is reported. I would like to quote only a short example in Persian taken from a comedy in colloquial language. The characters of this comedy wonder about the presence of a policeman in front of their house, and one of them tells the other what a third party has seen:

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(2) sob-e sahar Nane dide-bud-eg, b~z-am jelo xune morning-LIG dawn PN had.seen-CLIT:3SG again before house r~h mirafte way was.going 'At dawn Naneh had seen him, he was again walking in front of the house.' Mirafte ('was going') is an evidential signaling that the information was obtained from Naneh. It is no longer new, and the speaker is neither surprised by it nor in doubt about it but only reports it as hearsay. Interestingly, the other verb form didebud ('had seen'), which probably also echoes Naneh's words, is not an evidential. This piece of information is as new (or old) as the other, but apparently the speaker feels no need to mark it as hearsay because it is insignificant. I think that the common feature of the three values is actually a rather abstract mental operation. The opposition is not direct vs. indirect knowledge, old vs. new knowledge, or assimilated vs. unassimilated knowledge. Rather, it is an opposition at the morphosyntactic level between forms indicating nothing about the source of information and forms referring to the source of the information without specifying it. 'Ordinary', non-evidential forms state the facts purely and simply. Evidential forms, on the other hand, point to the speaker's b e c o m i n g a w a r e of the facts. In the case of hearsay, for example, the evidential implies 'as I have heard'; in the case of inference it implies 'as I infer'; in the case of unexpected perception it implies 'as I see'. The speaker is somehow split into two persons, the one speaking and the one who has heard, inferred, or perceived. Since the three meanings are expressed by the same forms, they should be subsumed under a common semantic value. This can be paraphrased as 'as it appears', regardless of whether the appearance itself arises from hearsay, inference, or perception. The operation creates a distance not between the speaker and the event, as Slobin and Aksu (1982) claim, but between the speaker and his or her own discourse, or between the speaker as the person acquiring evidence and the person expressing it. In neutral expression, speakers cling to their own discourse by virtue of the very laws of linguistic intercourse. In evidential expression implying 'as it appears' - they somehow distance themselves from what they are saying. Their utterances are no longer neutral, immediate statements but rather statements m e d i a t e d by (unspecified) references to the evidence. For this reason, this particular kind of evidential operation might be called 'mediative'. It is sometimes said that in this sort of utterance, the speaker abstains from 'validating' the assertion or 'warranting' its truth. But such terms imply that 'ordinary' unmarked utterances include operations of validation or warranty which are lacking in mediative utterances, and it seems to me that this interpretation is not quite accurate. If assertions are taken to be true in ordinary unmarked utterances, this is only because this is the normal sincerity condition of speech: the speaker says something, intending it to be taken as true. Discourse then includes no particular marking and implies no special operations. Mediative discourse, on the other hand, has markers implying distance with respect to the source of knowledge. For this reason, in languages having the mediative category, evidential (mediative) verb forms are

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morphologically and functionally marked and, as such, are opposed to the unmarked forms. This distancing should not be confused with expressed doubt or presumption. True, dubitative or presumptive values may easily be associated with the mediative, but they are then expressed by lexical items like 'probably', 'perhaps', 'supposedly', 'presumably', etc., or by modal auxiliaries added to evidential verb forms. The evidential forms themselves are neither dubitative nor presumptive. Tajik, for example, has developed (mediative) evidential verb forms and presumptive and dubitative forms which differ from the evidential forms; and according to Michailovsky (1996), the 'inferential' (i.e., mediative) in Nepali implies no doubt at all: "The speaker uses the inferential to state a fact while drawing attention to his becoming aware of it ... In any case, the reported facts remain asserted: the speaker does not question their reality" (1996:116). The 'mediative', in other words, implies only ' as it appears', and nothing else.

3.2. In Balkan and Middle Eastern languages, evidential verb forms generally have
the same uses, and the three uses mentioned above are central in most of them. This does not mean, however, that the grammatical categories are exactly the same in all of them. There are interesting, although minor, differences. The systems of evidential verb forms differ somewhat, and the contents of the signifi of the categories do not exactly coincide from one language to the next. I would like to mention a few examples very briefly. In Persian, the evidential paradigm consists of a set of verb forms derived from the perfect, whose common signifig includes special meanings not conveyed by other verb forms (Lazard, 1985, 1996, in press); this is, indeed, the reason for positing the existence of the category. These meanings, however, are not all evidential: besides indicating hearsay and inference, the forms may also indicate events from the distant past (in the first person, they mean reminiscence) and retrospective views on past experience. The signifi~ of the category thus extends beyond evidential values proper. Also, the mirative is not clearly indicated, probably because all evidential forms refer to the past. It is, however, indicated in Tajik, a dialectal variety of Persian whose evidential forms may refer to the present (see the example above). The second example is Bulgarian. While in the other languages (particularly in Turkish) history is narrated in the ordinary, unmarked register, in Bulgarian, historians more often than not make use of the evidential. Bulgarian has two sets of evidential verb forms: besides simple forms (i.e., perfect without auxiliary in the 3rd person, and the like) there are compound (or 'overcompound') forms which make the mediative distance greater. Finally, there is the example of endopathic verbs in Albanian. In most languages with endopathic verbs (verbs denoting feelings), the evidential is impossible in the 1st person, because speakers have immediate, intimate knowledge of their own feelings. In Albanian, however, feeling verbs in the 1st person are obligatorily used in the so-called 'admirative mood' (Duchet and PErnaska, 1996: 35-36). The speaker, in effect saying 'I am sorry (or glad or thirsty, etc.), as it appears', pretends to discover his or her own feelings. This confers intensity on the expression.

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3.3. Aside from the idiosyncrasies of particular languages, it is possible to ascribe

the following features to the evidential (the mediative) in Balkan and Middle Eastern languages: - the speaker may choose between the unmarked register and the marked one; - the marked register (the evidential forms) implies a reference to the acknowledgment of the event by the speaker; - this reference is unspecified, consisting only of what may be paraphrased as 'as it appears'; - it creates a distance between the speaker and the speaker's own discourse; - in itself, it expresses neither dubiety nor presumption. These characteristics make clear the extent to which the evidential in these languages differs from the evidential in such languages as Tuyuca and Wintu.

4. C o n d i t i o n s

for typological comparison

In his interesting paper on evidentiality and universal grammar, Plungian (this volume) aptly summarizes the basic problem of typological work: "grammatical typology rests on the fact that the grammatical systems of the world's languages are thought of as comparable ... If grammatical values are comparable, they must have something in common; and this 'something' can be only one thing: their semantics". Grammatical categories of different languages, even if they may bear some resemblance to one another, are always different. They are different because they are defined by their oppositions, and the oppositions are language-specific. What they have in common in cross-language perspective is their semantic content. But this, considered in itself, independently from linguistic structure, is amorphous. Semantic substance may be structured by cognitive activity that is probably somehow reflected in linguistic systems. But it is only through linguistic systems, by means of crosslanguage comparison, that we may hope to get some knowledge of it. When different meanings are found to be expressed by the same signifiant (hence found to belong to the same signifid) in languages which have had no historical contact, the linguist is encouraged to conclude that they occupy adjacent places in universal semantic space. This methodology, for instance, brought the kinship between the notions of habitual past and counterfactual past to light (Lazard, 1975) and made it possible to draw semantic maps, as was done by Lazard (1981) for the durative past, Anderson (1982, 1986) for the perfect and for evidentiality, and van der Auwera and Plungian (1998) for modality. Such work reveals something about the structures of semantic space, but the structures themselves are perceived only after careful comparative analysis, and they therefore cannot be used as bases for typological comparison. And this is the unhappy condition of the typologist. The categories of individual languages can be described with reasonable accuracy, but they are not fully comparable; and their semantic substance, which is their common background, is in

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itself unavoidably fuzzy. The logical conclusion is that cross-language comparison, and consequently linguistic typology, are impossible. There are actually many eager, even enthusiastic, typologists, however, who are currently doing interesting work in different branches of grammatical typology. This work is based on hypotheses about the possible structuring of relevant parts of universal semantic space. The problem is how to build hypotheses that are suitable for the investigation and comparison of the grammatical systems structuring the semantic substance of the areas being investigated, and are useful in discovering relations of higher generality than those of the specific grammatical systems being studied. Too often, the hypotheses are based on preconceived ideas about the world or about the cognitive treatment of the world by the human mind, without enough attention to how the world is treated by languages, especially in distinctions established in their grammatical systems. The result is the invention of attractive theoretical constructions whose relevance to research on language may be questionable. Nevertheless, it remains true that the only way out of the basic difficulty of linguistic typology (especially grammatical typology) is to form hypotheses and elaborate sets of concepts for each grammatical domain for use as a tertium comparationis. Such concepts are logically arbitrary and necessarily based on intuition; however, the intuitions behind them are better for being inspired byt a large body of experience with linguistic structures. Only via empirical research can these hypothesis be validated. If they are not validated, they have to be replaced by others that better account for the data. I am afraid there is no other possible procedure for typological comparison. In his paper, Plungian (this volume) makes an interesting move in this direction for the domain of evidentiality. He proposes 'a tentative classification for evidential values' and tries to plot the attested grammatical systems against the grid he has established. In his table of evidential values, he distinguishes, first, between direct and indirect evidence, then, within direct evidence, between visual and non-visual perception, etc., and, within indirect evidence, between inference and reasoning, etc. The table, although presented as 'a rather language-independent overview of evidential semantics', is not built on purely a priori consideration of ontological realities. Rather, it is influenced by the consideration of distinctions actually introduced by grammatical systems. The author is careful to consider the data collected by Willett (1988) from the published descriptions of various languages which have grammaticalized evidentiality. I have no serious objection to Plunian's table of evidential values. I would only suggest that it perhaps would be advisable to make a special place in the table for knowledge derived from tradition or common knowledge, which is not the same as knowledge derived from reported speech (hearsay). The former is normally part of what the speaker has practically always known, and, moreover, it is usually shared by the speaker and hearer. This is rather different from reported news. More importantly, there are languages where common knowledge is expressed by a special evidential and clearly distinguished from hearsay. Evidential values are differently distributed in the language-specific grammatical systems. Plungian distinguishes between grammatical systems on the basis of

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degrees of prominence given in these systems to different oppositions: direct vs. indirect evidence, personal vs. non-personal access,~ etc., and possibly with more or less sophisticated additional oppositional subcategories. He sets apart systems in which, in his opinion, epistemic judgment is mixed up with evidential reference, calling these 'modalized evidential systems' and using the so-called 'Balkan systems' (systems in use in languages of South Eastern Europe and the Middle East) as an example. He thinks that these systems imply a judgment about the reliability of the information, with indirect evidence being less reliable than direct evidence. And he derives the mirative value from the 'semantic component of lower certainty'. The analysis presented here in section 3 is clearly in disagreement with this interpretation. According to the earlier analysis, the mediative variety of evidentiality, to the extent that it is grammaticalized in the languages concerned, does not imply doubt or even presumption. It may easily slide towards presumptive and dubitative, and it is often accompanied by markers of presumption or doubt, but, in itself, it does not imply any epistemic judgment. If this is true, the mirative value cannot be derived from such a judgment. I believe I have shown how it can be explained in a much more natural way. The most characteristic feature of the systems discussed in this paper, in contrast to other evidential systems, is that the discourse marked as evidential is in opposition to neutral discourse, which says nothing about the evidence. This feature is very important and I think that it must be taken into account in the elaboration of the theoretical basis necessary for the comparison of evidential systems. This basis might be conceived of as being composed of several successive questions which the linguist has to answer when looking for evidentials in a language: (1) Is evidentiality grammaticalized in the language? (2) If there is a grammatical system of evidentiality in the language, is there a register of neutral discourse opposed to evidential discourse, or must the discourse always include a marker referring to the source of the information conveyed? (3) If there is more than one evidential, what oppositions are established between the evidentials? Here Plungian's table of evidential values and classification of systems are fully relevant. Our information on evidential systems is still very scanty. Evidentiality is not grammaticalized in the languages we are most familiar with. This is probably why it has not been studied much, and why, when it was first noticed in Turkish, Bulgarian, and Albanian, it was considered as an areal peculiarity. It appears today that evidentiality is present in many languages as a grammatical category, and perhaps even a major one like mood or aspect. This is mentioned in a number of works, but the data are still insufficient to make a fully satisfying general account possible. For this reason, our proposals are unavoidably provisional. We urgently need more extensive and accurate descriptions. He calls non-personal knowledge 'mediated' knowledge. It should be cleat that he takes the term 'mediated' in another sense than I do. The mediative presented in section 3 does not imply mediation through other people, but through the distancing of the speaker from his own speech.

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References
Anderson, Loyd B., 1982. The 'perfect' as a universal and as a language specific category. In: P.J. Hopper, ed., 227-264. Anderson, Loyd 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. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Barnes, Janet, 1984. Evidentials in the Tuyuca verb. International Journal of American Linguistics 50: 255-271. DeLancey, Scott, 1997. Mirativity: The grammatical marking of unexpected information. Linguistic Typology 1: 33-52. DonabEdian, Ana'/d, 1996. Pour une interpretation des diffErentes valeurs du mEdiatif en armdnien occidental. In: Z. GuentchEva, ed., 87-108. DonabEdian, Ana'/d, this volume. Towards a semasiological account of evidentials: An enunciative approach of -er in Modern Western Armenian. Duchet, Jean-Louis and Remzi PErnaska, 1996. L'admiratif albanais: recherche d'un invariant sEmantique. In: Z. GuentchEva, ed., 3146. GuentchEva, Zlatka, ed., 1996. L'Enonciation mEdiatisEe. Louvain: Peeters. Hopper, Paul J., ed., 1982. Tense-aspect: Between semantics and pragmatics. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Johanson, Lars and Bo Utas, eds., in press. Evidentials: Turkish, Iranian, and neighbouring languages. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Kozintseva, Natalia, 1995. Modern Eastern Armenian. (Languages of the World/Materials 22.) Miinchen: Lincom Europa. Lazard, Gilbert, 1975. La catEgorie de l'Eventuel. MElanges linguistiques offerts ~t Emile Benveniste, 347-358. Paris: SociEtE de linguistique. Lazard, Gilbert, 198 l. La qufite des universaux sEmantiques en linguistique. Actes sEmiotiques-Bulletin 4, fasc. 19, 26-37. Lazard, Gilbert, 1985. L'infErentiel ou passe distanci6 en persan. Studia iranica 14: 2742. Lazard, Gilbert, 1996. Le m6diatif en persan. In: Z. GuentchEva, ed., 21-30. Lazard, Gilbert, 1999. Mirativity, evidentiality, mediativity or other? Linguistic Typology 3: 91-109. Lazard, Gilbert, in press. Le mEdiatif: ConsidErations thEoriques et application "~l'iranien. In: L. Johanson and B. Utas, eds. Michailovsky, Boyd, 1996. L'infEtentiel du nepali. In: GuentchEva, ed., 109-123. Plungian, Vladimir A., this volume. The place of evidentiality within the universal grammatical space. Schlichter, Alice, 1986. The origin and deictic nature of Wintu evidentials. In: W. Chafe and J. Nichols, eds., Evidentiality, 46-59. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. Slobin, Dan I. and Ayhan Aksu, 1982. Tense, aspect, and modality in the use of the Turkish evidential. In: P.J. Hopper, ed., 185-200. van der Auwera, Johan and Vladimir A. Plungian, 1998. Modality's semantic map. Linguistic Typology 2: 79-124. Willett, Thomas, 1988. A cross-linguistic survey of the grammaticizations of evidentiality. Studies in Language 12: 51-97.

Gilbert Lazard, born 1920, is Professor at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (La Sorbonne, Paris). His publications include works on Iranian linguistics and philology and on general linguistics. He is particularly interested in syntactic typology: for years, he has organized and headed the typological research group RIVALC ('Recherche interlinguistique sur les variations d'actance et leurs corrElats', Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris). He published L'actance (Paris: PUF, 1994; English translation: Actancy, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1998).