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The Ecuadorian Siona reportative is prima facie an evidential par excellence because it indicates that the information contained in the utterance has been acquired through hearsay. However, the morphosyntactic and semantic behavior of the reportative verb form demonstrates that it is not an evidential. Rather, it is part of the clause-typing system, together with the assertive, interrogative, and imperative. Clause-typing relates to the assignment of authority: the speaker holds the epistemic authority in assertions, the addressee in questions, and a non-speech-act participant in reports. The hearsay reading of the reportative clause type emanates from a shift of epistemic authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidentiality - a grammatical expression of information source (, ) - is often expressed on a clausal level, and its marking is associated with the verb. In a few languages, a noun phrase can acquire its own evidential specification. Evidentiality can be expressed autonomously, or be fused with another grammatical category, including aspect, tense, or mood for verbs, or spatial distance and topicality for noun phrases. We investigate interactions and dependencies between evidentiality and other grammatical categories, both verbal and nominal. A number of such dependencies is supported by the diachronic development and history of evidentials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To gain more insight into evidentiality, the grammatical marking of information source, it is worth studying the category in its relation to other grammatical categories. This study explores tensed evidentials, morphemes in which tense and evidentiality are fused, in 36 languages from four macro-areas (North America, South America, Eurasia, and Papunesia). The study reveals several interactions between tense values and evidential values. As opposed to what has been claimed, firsthand future evidentials seem to exist. Visual and non-visual evidentials occur equally with present and past, whereas mental activity evidentials and reportative evidentials are much more limited to the past. These findings conform to the logic of tense: every type of evidentiality can be gathered in the past, whereas some are less suited for present or future. As a result, we find exceptionless implicational hierarchies of the form future ⊃ present ⊃ past for several evidential values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The range of mirative meanings across the world's languages subsumes sudden discovery, surprise, and unprepared mind of the speaker ( and also the audience or the main character of a story). Mirative markers may also convey overtones of counterexpectation and new information. The range of mirative meanings may be expressed through a verbal affix, a complex predicate, or a pronoun. Evidentials whose major function is to express information source may have mirative extensions, especially in the context of the 1st person subject. The mirative category appears to be susceptible to linguistic diffusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Albanian admiratives specify a complex of meanings including 'surprise', 'disbelief', and 'report'. "Non-confirmative" summarizes these in contrast to Macedonian's "confirmative". Macedonian synthetic preterites specify speaker confirmation, and Macedonian analytic preterites therefore include -but are not limited to - non-confirmation. Albanian synthetic pasts do not specify confirmativity, and admiratives specify a present (disbelief, report) or previous (surprise) state when the speaker would not confirm the event. The Albanian admirative is used where similar Balkan Slavic and Turkish paradigmatic sets are not. The category "mirative " is unnecessary for the Balkan languages, but "admirative " describes the specific intersection of non-confirmative meanings of Albanian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article re-presents the case, first presented in DeLancey (1997), for the mirative as a crosslinguistic category, and responds to critiques of that work by Gilbert Lazard and Nathan Hill. The nature of the mirative, a category which marks a statement as representing information which is new or unexpected, is exemplified with data from Kham (Tibeto-Burman) and Hare (Athabaskan). The mirative category is shown to be distinct from the well-known mediative or indirective evidential category. Finally, the role of mirativity in the complex verbal systems of Tibetan languages is briefly outline [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues, contra Hill (this volume), that mirativity is an independent linguistic category. It also argues, contra DeLancey (1997), that this category should be defined not only in terms of newsworthiness for the speaker but also in terms of newsworthiness for the addressee, and that expressions of mirativity do not necessarily have an evidential component. These claims are supported by examples of mirative expressions in a number of languages from different genetic stocks. Finally, the article suggests an explanation for the fact that in many languages evidentiality and mirativity are indeed expressed by the same linguistic means. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]