This dissertation provides an empirically driven, theoretically informed investigation of how speakers of Gitksan, a Tsimshianic language spoken in the northwest coast of Canada, express knowledge about the world around them. There are three main goals that motivate this investigation: The first is to provide the first detailed description of the evidential and modal system in Gitksan. The second is to provide a formal semantic and pragmatic account of this system that adequately explains the meanings of the modals and evidentials, as well as how they are used in discourse. The third goal is to examine the specific properties the Gitksan evidential/modal system brings to bear on current theories of semantics and pragmatics, as well as the consequences this analysis has on the study of modality and evidentiality cross-linguistically. In addition to documenting the evidential and modal meanings in Gitksan, I work through a variety of theoretical tools designed to determine what level of meaning the individual evidentials in Gitksan operate on. The current state of research into the connection between evidentiality and epistemic modality has identified two different types of evidentials defined by the level of meaning they operate on: propositional and illocutionary evidentials. These two types correspond to a distinction between modal evidentials and non-modal evidentials respectively. I show that Gitksan has both modal and non-evidentials. This leads to an analysis where the Gitksan modal evidentials are treated as a specialized type of epistemic modals, and the non-modal evidentials are sentential force specifiers. I also identify various features of the evidential system that bring specific issues to bear upon current theories of the semantics and pragmatics of modality. This has four outcomes: first, I present a novel analysis of variable modal force in modals with fixed quantification. Secondly, I discuss the effect of modal evidentials in Conjectural Questions.

After an introductory chapter that provides an overview to theoretical issues in tense, aspect, modality and evidentiality, this volume presents a variety of original contributions that are firmly empirically-grounded based on elicited or corpus data, while adopting different theoretical frameworks. Thus, some chapters rely on large diachronic corpora and provide new qualitative insight on the evolution of TAM systems through quantitative methods, while others carry out a collostructional analysis of past-tensed verbs using inferential statistics to explore the lexical grammar of verbs. A common goal is to uncover semantic regularities and variation in the TAM systems of the languages under study by taking a close look at context. Such a fine-grained approach contributes to our understanding of the TAM systems from a typological perspective. The focus on well-known Indo-European languages (e.g. French, German, English, Spanish) and also on less commonly studied languages (e.g. Hungarian, Estonian, Avar, Andi, Tagalog) provides a valuable cross-linguistic perspective.

In this volume, the researcher interested in evidentiality and epistemic modality finds accounts of evidentials with epistemic overtones as well as analyses of the influence of contextual factors such as genre or speech-participants.

This book provides argues for a compositional, truth-conditional, crosslinguistic semantics for evidentiality, the linguistic encoding of the source of information on which a statement is based. Central to the proposed theory is the distinction between what propositional content is at-issue and what content is not-at-issue. Evidentials contribute not-at-issue content, and can affect the level of commitment a sentence makes to the main proposition, which is contributed by sentential mood. In this volume, Sarah Murray builds on recent work in the formal semantics of evidentials and related phenomena, and proposes a semantics that does not appeal to separate dimensions of illocutionary meaning. Instead, she argues that all sentences make three semantic contributions: at-issue content, not-at-issue content, and an illocutionary relation. At-issue content is presented and made available for subsequent anaphora, but is not directly added to the common ground; not-at-issue content directly updates the common ground; and the illocutionary relation uses a proposition to impose structure on the common ground, which, depending on the clause type, can trigger further updates. The analysis is supported by extensive empirical data from Cheyenne, drawn from the authors own fieldwork, as well as from English and a variety of other languages.

This volume explores phenomena which come under the heading of epistemic modalities and evidentiality in more or less well-known languages (Germanic, Romance, Balto-Slavic, Hungarian, Tibetan, Lakandon and Yucatec Maya, Arwak-Chibchan Kogi and Ika). It reveals cross-linguistic variations in the structuring of these vast fields of enquiry and clearly demonstrates the relevance and interplay of multiple factors involved in the analysis of these two conceptual domains. Although the contributions present diverging descriptive traditions, they are nonetheless within the broad domain of functional-typological linguistics and give access to distinct yet comparable approaches. They all converge around a number of key issues: modal verbs; the relationship between epistemic modality and evidentiality; the relationship of modal notions with some tense and aspect notions; the notions of (inter)subjectivity, commitment and (dis)engagement; the prosodic variation of modal adverbs, the diachronic connections between negation and evidential markers, the connection with mirativity. The volume is of interest to linguists and advanced graduate students working in general and theoretical linguistics, semantics, pragmatics, cognition, and typology.

This volume offers a thorough, systematic, and crosslinguistic account of evidentiality, the linguistic encoding of the source of information on which a statement is based. In some languages, the speaker always has to specify this source - for example whether they saw the event, heard it, inferred it based on visual evidence or common sense, or was told about it by someone else. While not all languages have obligatory marking of this type, every language has ways of referring to information source and associated epistemological meanings. The continuum of epistemological expressions covers a range of devices from the lexical means in familiar European languages and in many languages of Aboriginal Australia to the highly grammaticalized systems in Amazonia or North America. In this handbook, experts from a variety of fields explore topics such as the relationship between evidentials and epistemic modality, contact-induced changes in evidential systems, the acquisition of evidentials, and formal semantic theories of evidentiality. The book also contains detailed case studies of evidentiality in language families across the world, including Algonquian, Korean, Nakh-Dagestanian, Nambikwara, Turkic, Uralic, and Uto-Aztecan.

This book is an exploration of how knowledge about the reliability of information sources manifests itself in linguistic phenomena and use. It focuses on cooperation in language use and on how considerations of reliability influence what is done with the information acquired through language. E. McCready provides a detailed account of the phenomena of hedging and evidentiality and analyses them using tools from game theory, dynamic semantics, and formal epistemology. Hedging is argued to be a mechanism used by speakers to protect their reputations for cooperativity from damage inflicted by infelicitous discourse moves. The pragmatics of evidential use is also discussed in terms of the histories of interaction that influence reputation: the author argues that past experience with the evidence source indexed by the evidential determines how the process of adding information will proceed. The book makes many new connections between seemingly disparate aspects of linguistic meaning and practice. It will be of interest to specialists in semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language, as well as those in the fields of philosophy and cognitive science with an interest in language and epistemology.

This book brings together novel work on the semantics and pragmatics of certain indefinite expressions that also convey modality. These epistemic indefinites are determiners or pronouns that signal ignorance on the part of the speaker, such as German irgendein and Spanish algún: the sentence María se casó con algún medico ('Maria married some doctor or other') both makes an existential statement that there is a doctor that Maria married and signals the speaker's inability or unwillingness to identify the doctor in question. Although epistemic indefinites have featured in recent semantic literature, a full understanding of the phenomenon is still lacking: there is currently no agreement on the source of their epistemic component; there is insufficient cross-linguistic data to develop a semantic typology of these items; and the parallelisms and differences between epistemic indefinites and other expressions that convey epistemic modality have not been explored in depth. In this volume, a team of experts in the field offer novel empirical observations and important theoretical insights on epistemic indefinites and related topics such as modal free relatives, modified numerals, and epistemic modals. They provide a coherent overview of the issues that shape the subject as well as placing them in the context of current semantic research, moving towards the development of a semantic typology of epistemic indefinites that explores the place of these expressions within a general typology of modal items.

Current semantic fieldwork research has shown that the study of modality cannot be conducted via translation alone, yet much of what we know about modal expressions across the world’s language is still translation-based. This book aims to facilitate the study of modality across more diverse languages and a wider participant base by explaining and illustrating a nuanced set of methods, including storyboards, questionnaires, corpora research, experimental tasks, as well as a discussion of practical semantic fieldwork techniques. The methodological protocols tested and employed by the authors on underdescribed languages - spanning seven different language families - are intended to be applicable as cross-linguistic tools, while also indicating the successes and challenges of their contributions. Expanding the study of modality to a wider set of underdescribed languages will undoubtedly bring new insights into our theoretical understanding of modality and deepen our understanding of a cross-linguistic typology of modal expressions.