Search

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]

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]