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Some languages code that an action was performed unintentionally using evidentials, which in other contexts indicate a speaker’s source of information. Evidentials are only used for indicating nonvolitionality when an action was carried out by the speaker in the past. The evidential marker may carry a quite different meaning in coding nonvolitionality, this may be an extension of its primary meaning, or it may simply be a pragmatic interpretation of the use of a particular evidential in first person contexts. A nonvolitional interpretation can arise with nonvisual evidentials, visual or direct evidentials, inferential evidentials, and nonwitnessed, nonfirsthand or indirect evidentials.

Linguistics is the study of language, and for most non-linguists (including linguistics students), language is about communication. This paper examines the use of the terms communication, communicating and communicative in introductory linguistics texts to uncover the underlying assumptions about communication which they encapsulate. There are, in fact, relatively few mentions of communication in these introductory texts, and possible reasons for this are also examined.