This paper is concerned with the acquisition of the semantics and pragmatics of evidential markers in Turkish. Evidential markers encode the speaker’s source for the information being reported in the utterance. Turkish grammaticalizes evidentiality in two different past tense markers: -DI (past of direct experience) and –mIş (past of indirect experience). In this article, we report findings fro...

Epistemologists have argued that there are three basic sources of belief: perception, testimony and inference. These three belief sources correspond directly to the way in which many languages mark statements morphologically for sources of evidence for the statements (evidentiality). In this paper, we connect generalizations from the fields of epistemology and evidentiality. We also introduce a...

This paper presents an analysis of how evidentiality contributes to both the mirative and metaphorical interpretations of sentences. The connection between evidentiality and mirativity has received some attention in the literature, particularily in various language grammars and typological studies, yet the category of mirativity has still not found a place within any theory of meaning. In a nut...

What is the relation between language and thought? Specifically, how do linguistic and conceptual representations make contact during language learning? This paper addresses these questions by investigating the acquisition of evidentiality (the linguistic encoding of information source) and its relation to children's evidential reasoning. Previous studies have hypothesized that the acquisition ...

The grammatical category of evidentiality is traditionally conceived as marking the “information source” for the claim described by the sentence (see e.g. Anderson 1986; Willett 1988; Aikhenvald 2004). This paper defends the view that evidentiality need not be a semantic primitive but can rather be pragmatically derived from the spatiotemporal distance between the event described by the sentenc...

Many conditionals seem to convey the existence of a link between their antecedent and consequent. We draw on a recently proposed typology of conditionals to argue for an old philosophical idea according towhich the link is inferential in nature. We show that the proposal has explanatory force by presenting empirical results on the evidential meaning of certain English and Dutch modal expressions.

Cross-linguistic generic categories like evidentiality, tense, aspect, number, and person are entrenched in linguistic theory. However, it is not clear whether there is much empirical substance to them. There is a remarkable lack of criteria for what counts as a category. This paper tries to show that semantic maps can be used to give empirical substance to claims about cross-linguistic generic...