Functions of Language - Volume 31, Issue 1, 2024

Abstract

The use of according to + NP has rarely been the topic of any specialized research in relation to English evidentiality, although it would probably figure among the most frequent types of reportative evidentials found in written texts. One of the problems often associated with reportatives has related to the existence of the Reportative Exception (see, e.g. AnderBois 2014), referring to the fact that the speaker may not always subjectively endorse the proposition conveyed with the support of the evidential phrase. The present study reviews the history of according to + NP from Middle English onwards, after which it began to develop evidential functions, and shows how the tendency to reject the truth of the content of the proposition marked by according to + NP arose in specific contexts containing alternative information sources, comparison, or adversative clauses. It was shortly after the diachronic appearance of according to + NP in such contexts that the more periphrastic form, in accordance with + NP, began to renovate/renew the earlier, non-evidential meanings of according to + NP. The present study also attributes the development of according to + NP to a process of co-optation (e.g. Heine 2013) rather than grammaticalization.

Abstract

The marking on copular verbs in Tibetic languages is regarded as an exemplar of egophoricity, although the extent to which it has been grammaticalized varies between languages. Dzongkha, a southern Tibetic language, is somewhat atypical of the egophoric pattern in the sense that the basic opposition in copulas exhibits a mirative pattern, wherein the non-mirative (egophoric) copula occurs with all grammatical persons in declaratives and interrogatives, and the mirative (non-egophoric) occurs with the 3rd person and rarely with 1st and 2nd persons. The conversational data studied for this paper also show that the speaker need not take knowledge stances that bifurcate the world between objectively ‘old’ and ‘new’ knowledge and the attendant associations of knowledge with a particular grammatical person. Rather, the speaker’s representation of events is subjective, and dependent, in part, on the knowledge stances between speaker and respondent. What is in view in conversational interaction are the social goals of the conversation — assertions, face-saving strategies, and arriving at mutually shared knowledge — and the Dzongkha copulas are a manipulable linguistic resource in achieving these.

Abstract

This article presents a development of evidential categories derived from a verb related to the auditory sense in the evidential system attested in rGyalthang Tibetan varieties. The language varieties under study possess a morphological distinction of at least five evidentials in the access-to-information category and two evidentials in the source-of-information category. The discussion focuses on one morpheme derived from the Literary Tibetan verb grag ‘resound, hear’ used for both categories, and examines its process of grammaticalisation and degrammaticalisation. Elicited data illustrate the following functions: (1) grag as a nonvisual sensory evidential suffix that was further degrammaticalised as a copulative nonvisual sensory verb stem; (2) grag as a hearsay marker in a separate syntactic slot, which extended from (1); and (3) grag as a lexical verb stem meaning ‘hear’ [the common origin to (1) and (2)], which underwent two grammaticalisation processes.

Abstract

Evidentiality encodes how a speaker has access to the information contained in his/her proposition. It has been shown that some ‘evidential language’ speakers make a deliberate choice of evidentials while telling lies (Aikhenvald 2004). In this study, we recruited 40 native speakers of Turkish, an ‘evidential language’, to judge statements with evidentials using an eye-movement-monitoring-during-reading study with an end-of-sentence deception detection task. The participants read sentences with four conditions, containing a direct or indirect evidential form either compatible or incompatible with the given information source. Our results show that the indirect evidential condition was detected as a lie more often than the direct evidential condition. Readers had the tendency to judge stimulus material with source-evidentiality mismatch to be untruthful. These findings were mirrored in the eye-movement data, as we found gaze duration to be longer at the critical verb region for indirect evidential and mismatch conditions.

This article reviews Pragmatics of internet humour97830313190139783031319020