
Full text loading...
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.