Abstract
Chafe and Nichols’ (1986) pioneering work on evidentiality was concerned with how evidentiality is marked morphologically in American Indian languages to express different modes of knowledge. A turning point in studies of evidentiality has been the insight that there are many lexical and grammatical phenomena in European languages which seem to have a similar evidential function resulting in a widening of the understanding of the notion of evidentiality. As a result, the focus has now shifted to evidentiality in a wide sense and how evidential dimensions are expressed by lexical choices and communicative strategies.
The present volume is a welcome contribution to studies of evidentiality in this wider cognitive, functional and discourse-pragmatic perspective. The emphasis is on stance-taking ‘since the specification of the source and mode of access to knowledge may carry an indication of the speaker’s attitude and commitment towards the validity of the communicated information’ (p. 1).
A major theoretical issue in evidentiality is its relationship with epistemic modality. Given that there may be differences in the reliability or strength of knowledge depending on whether the source of knowledge is personal observation or inferential, we may predict that the concepts of modality and evidentiality cannot be completely unrelated. As can be expected, many articles in the volume are concerned with how we should deal with examples where there is a functional overlap between modality and evidentiality.
The volume consists of an introduction ‘setting the theme’ for the collection and 12 chapters divided into three sections. Section A contains two theoretically oriented papers on evidentiality. In the chapter on evidentiality in cognitive grammar, Langacker argues that the grounding of the clause is achieved not only by epistemic modal devices but by evidentials existing for the implementation of the semantic function specifying the source and reliability of information and that alternative devices for evidential marking constitute a single evidential system. The other theoretical paper, by Nuyts, represents an approach to evidentiality in a functional perspective where inferentiality, on one hand, belongs to a hierarchy of qualifications and is related to epistemic modality while hearsay and experienced (first-hand or direct) evidence are really different categories, which are not part of the qualificational system.
Section B contains five chapters dealing with different aspects of evidentiality in grammar and discourse. The data come from several different languages including English, the Romance languages, Russian, Dutch, German and Lithuanian. The chapters are generally corpus-based and analyse evidential markers quantitatively and qualitatively.
Böhm, Haßler and Hennemann compare the equivalents of the evidential adverbs seemingly and apparently in Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, French) and Russian on the basis of a variety of language-specific corpora to draw conclusions about their semantic functions and syntactic usage.
Mulder’s chapter is a valuable survey of the predicates that are used in Spanish to express evidentiality and epistemic modality. The focus for the qualitative analysis is on 55 different verbs including perception verbs and ‘spontaneous mental process verbs’ associated with ‘affective evidentiality’ to refer to evidence originating in non-verifiable sources.
Seem-type verbs provide a number of challenges which have to do with the problem of pinning down their exact epistemic and evidential values and their constructional variability. Mortelmans discusses the German verb scheinen with its Dutch equivalents lijken and schijnen on the basis of translation patterns in a Dutch–German parallel corpus.
Harmes’ chapter is a synchronic and diachronic study of the Dutch auxiliary verb zou(den) (‘should’) on the basis of electronic corpora from different periods. The general tendency over time is that the meaning of zou(den) has specialized to hypotheticality and from this meaning its use as a hedging marker has developed.
Usonienè and Šinkūnienė address the occurrence of so-called ‘passive evidentials’ grammatically realizing inferential or reportive evidentiality in authentic contemporary Lithuanian on the basis of corpora representing academic discourse, fiction and news discourse.
Section C includes five papers exploring the relationship between evidentiality (and epistemic modality) and their variation across discourse domains and genres, particularly in journalistic and scientific discourse.
Marín Arrese presents two case studies of evidential expressions for indirect evaluative and indirect reportative evidential expressions on the basis of written journalistic discourse and unscripted oral discourse in comparable corpora in English and Spanish.
The objective in Hidalgo-Downing’s chapter is to explore differences and similarities in the choice of evidential and epistemic markers in scientific articles written by experts and writers whose aim is to explain the process to a broader audience.
Evidentiality can be analysed in many different traditions. Besnard uses the French linguist Culioli’s theory of ‘enunciative operations’ to analyse the roles of be likely to and be expected to in journalistic discourse to represent different points of view.
Ruskan examines evidentials in journalistic discourse. The topic is Lithuanian markers focusing on the non-agreeing present passive participles (cf. English thought) or non-agreeing adjectives (cf. English evident) used as complement-taking predicates (or parentheticals) or adverbs with the same meaning.
Finally, Breeze discusses the frequency of the English passive of reporting/thinking verbs (‘be said/thought to be’), addressing the issue of whether they are undergoing grammaticalization by tracing their developments over the last 200 years on the basis of British and American English corpora.
The book represents an impressive collection of papers mirroring the recent shift in evidentiality studies to cognitive and functional aspects. By opening up research on evidentiality to semantic, functional and pragmatic aspects, it shows convincingly how evidential markers have an important role to express personal attitudes, beliefs and evaluation. The overarching theme is launched by the two theoretical articles in the field of cognitive grammar and functional cognitive grammar. In addition, it would have been interesting to have a third thematic chapter in Section A focusing on the discourse-pragmatic perspective in evidentiality studies.
The individual papers in the volume contribute to the ongoing theoretical debate on the integration of or overlap between evidentiality and epistemic modality and to the description of how evidentiality is realized in different languages, genres and domains. The focus in the genre-related studies is on the presentation of one’s source of evidence as a practice or strategy in journalistic or academic discourse and the functions that it fulfils in these types of text. A related issue, which is only foreshadowed in this book, has to do with the role of evidentiality to express the source of knowledge in informal conversation or in argumentative discourse. Further studies along these lines may be envisaged, taking their inspiration from the discussion of evidentiality in this volume.