Evidentiality and epistemic modality in Zhuang

This paper discusses evidentiality and epistemic modality in Zhuang, a Tai language spoken in South China’s Guangxi Province and surrounding regions. A set of verbs of SPEAKING are found in Zhuang that describe the sources of information. These typically involve the grammaticalised marker nau⁴ which derives from a lexical verb meaning ‘say’, forming a rich array of expressions to mark direct and indirect speech, hearsay and other types of reported information, which carry a wide variety of evidential and epistemic overtones such as surprise, self-correction, mirativity, uncertainty, among others. A number of sentence-final particles, along with hedges and sensory verbs, are also found with these functions. Each of these conveys different degrees of reliability of the source of information.