Evidentiality and temporal distance learning

Abstract

The grammatical category of evidentiality is traditionally defined as marking evidence type or related concepts (Anderson 1986, Willett 1988, Aikhenvald 2004. I argue against this received view as I show that evidential morphemes in Bulgarian mark the temporal distance between the time at which the speaker learned the described proposition and the topic time. I also demonstrate that Bulgarian evidentials represent projective/backgrounded content that is informative but does not affect the described proposition, which is plainly entailed. The latter fact especially has important typological and theoretical consequences. The proposal is formalized in a logic that extends Dynamic Predicate Logic by adding propositional variables (cf. AnderBois et al. 2010).

Evidentiality, Learning Events and Spatiotemporal Distance: The View from Bulgarian

“…the event of the speaker acquiring the relevant evidence for her claim. While the empirical focus is on Bulgarian, this work adds to previous proposals about evidentiality in typologically unrelated languages which aim to derive the intuition of secondary information from the relationship between times/events/situations (see Nikolaeva 1999;Fleck 2007;Speas 2010;Koev 2011;Kalsang et al 2013;Lee 2013;Smirnova 2013). The view of evidentiality as a spatiotemporal distance undermines the claim that evidential sentences in Bulgarian have modal force (see Izvorski 1997;Smirnova 2013) and correctly predicts that speakers are typically committed to the core proposition of the sentence.…”

“…Relatedly, one might wonder whether other versions of the temporal account fall prey to the same objections. Koev (2011), for example, treats the Bulgarian evidential as a secondary past tense marker which requires that (roughly) the event time precedes the learning time. This version of the temporal account can explain the infelicity of (27)-(28): the presence of the evidential in these examples requires that the event time and the learning time are disjoint.…”

“…Given this background, I will present the temporal account of evidentiality in the next section. I will focus on the particular version of it defended in Lee (2013) and Smirnova (2013), and will only briefly mention Koev (2011).…”

“…In Section 2, I show that viewing indirect evidentiality as reporting non-witnessed events does not quite fit the meaning of the Bulgarian evidential. In Section 3, I critically examine the claim that Bulgarian evidential sentences encode a purely temporal relation between the described event and the event of acquiring the stated information (see Koev 2011;Lee 2013;Smirnova 2013). I demonstrate that the full range of data cannot be accounted for without also specifying the spatial location of these two events.…”

The Acquisition of Syntactically Encoded Evidentiality

“…One prominent school of thought characterizes (some) evidentials as epistemic modals (e.g., Izvorski 1997); many others characterize evidentiality as a nonpresuppositional not-at-issue content (Simons et al 2010), meaning it projects and is backgrounded (e.g., Faller 2002;Murray 2010;Koev 2011). This is because the semantic behavior of evidentiality is relatively consistent across languages: The evidential component of a sentence always scopes outside of negation, and it is generally not deniable (Faller 2006;Murray 2012).…”