evidential

1999a, The Semantics of Northern Khanty Evidentials.

In the introduction to her article, Marja Leinonen lists all the Finno-Ugric languages that use grammatical marking to indicate an indirect evidential source of information (2000: 419-420).

It is worth noting that within the realis category the indicative and evidential are not opposites: the Khanty indicative does not code any value of evidentiality.

Aikhenvald (2004) notes that reported evidentials often come to be interpreted as marking information the speaker does not vouch for (as is the case, for example, in Estonian and Tariana).

He looks specifically at the evidential marking of hearsay, inference and mirativity, and argues that these indirect evidentials create a distance between the speaker and the discourse by marking the speaker as distinct from the person who acquired the evidence for the proposition expressed.

However, as has been noted for reported evidentials in grammaticized evidential systems, the hearsay use is possible with first person in situations where the speaker was not in a full state of consciousness when the event occurred (Curnow 2003).

The nominative source of the Livonian reported indicative marker makes it especially close to the reported evidentials in the eastern dialects of South Estonian despite the fact that agreement with the subject in number is a specific feature of Courland Livonian (cf.

This kind of reanalysis of the complement clause is considered to be a possible source of Latvian and Lithuanian reported evidentials (see Walchli 2000 : 194-195).

Unlike participles, which typologically constitute a common source of grammatical evidentials (especially in the languages of Eastern Europe; see Kehayov 2008), agent nouns lend themselves only rarely to the expression of evidentiality.

1) Recent views on the relationship between evidentials and modals have been put forward by V.

Besides, modal verbs are actually lexical units, and their treatment should not be subsumed under that of grammatical evidentials.

I have no data about the use of evidentials in non-indicative modalities.

Evidentials have not any time reference of their own.

The source of grammaticalized evidentiality is the previous evidential strategy, for example, the jussive oodaku 'he should wait' has evolved from the third person imperative.

The evidential meaning is closely related to epistemic modality.