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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 ques-
tion of how to build a set of concepts to be used as a tertium comparationis. © 2001 Elsevier
Science B.V. All rights reserved.
I. Introduction
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 proceed-
ings 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 grammat-
icalization of evidentiality (section 2) and the value of evidentials in Balkan and Middle Eastern lan-
guages (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
360 G. Lazard / Journal o[ Pragmatics 33 (200 l) 359-307
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 gram-
matical system of this language, there are specific forms (signifiant) whose seman-
tic-pragmatic content (signifhx) is basically a reference to the source of the informa-
tion conveyed by the discourse.
Although all languages have means of qualifying utterances by introducing refer-
ences 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 per-
fect 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 evi-
dentiality, but they do not yet possess a grammatical evidential category.
On the other hand, there are languages in which every verb form bears a mor-
pheme referring to the source of information. Tuyuca is such a language: "The inde-
pendent 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 evi-
dence, 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, "evi-
dential deixis is an alternative to the temporal orientation of 'Western' civilization".
Most languages spoken in South Eastern Europe and Western Asia (e.g., Alban-
ian, 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 indi-
cates 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
G. Lazard /Journal of Pragmatics 33 (2001) 359-367 361
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.
3.1. 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 evi-
dence 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:
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 dide-
bud ('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 specify-
ing 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 dis-
course 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 state-
ments m e d i a t e d by (unspecified) references to the evidence. For this reason, this par-
ticular kind of evidential operation might be called 'mediative'.
It is sometimes said that in this sort of utterance, the speaker abstains from 'vali-
dating' 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 accu-
rate. 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
G, Lazard /Journal of Prugmatics 33 (2001) 359-367 363
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 evi-
dential 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 eviden-
tial 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 Per-
sian 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, histori-
ans more often than not make use of the evidential. Bulgarian has two sets of evi-
dential 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 feel-
ings. 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 dis-
cover his or her own feelings. This confers intensity on the expression.
364 G. Lazard /Journal of Pragmatics 33 (2001) 359-3(77
- the speaker may choose between the unmarked register and the marked one;
- the marked register (the evidential forms) implies a reference to the acknowledg-
ment 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.
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.
G. Lazard / Journal of Pragmatics 33 (2001) 359-367 367
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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 par-
ticularly 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 trans-
lation: Actancy, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1998).