Marize Dall 'Aglio Hattnher,
UNESP,
São José do Rio Preto, Brazil
Kees Hengeveld, Universiteit
van Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
The
traditional category of evidentiality is split into three
different categories in Functional Discourse Grammar. This
model distinguishes between:
(i)
Reportative modality, which operates at the layer of
the Communicated Content at the Interpersonal Level, indicates
that the speaker is not expressing his/her own cognitive
material, but is passing on the opinions of others;
(ii) Evidential modality, which operates at the
layer of the Propositional Content at the Representational
Level, indicates how the speaker arrived at the Propositional
Content;
(iii) Event perception, which operates at the layer of
the State-of-Affairs at the Representational Level, signals
whether or not an event was witnessed by the speaker.
The
meaning differences between these categories may be
illustrated by means of the following sentences, discussed in
Dik & Hengeveld (1991), who show that the three types of
complement clause illustrated here display a range of
differences as regards their grammatical behaviour:
(1)
I heard from John that Peter had been fighting.
(2)
I saw on her face that Peter had been fighting.
(3)
I saw Peter fighting.
In
(1) the complement clause represents the Communicated Content
(C) originally produced by the original speaker; in (2) it
represents the Propositional Content (p) resulting from an
inference made on the basis of visual information; and in (3)
it represents a State-of-Affairs (e) that was perceived
directly. Corresponding with these complementation strategies,
Hengeveld & Mackenzie (2008) postulate three operator/modifier
categories at the level of C, p and e.
This paper investigates the question to what extent the
grammatical expression of
evidentiality in a variety of languages may be
explained in terms of this threefold distinction, focusing on
languages that have more than one of the aforementioned
categories of evidentiality. In our argumentation we will show
that in these languages the restrictions on cooccurrence of evidential categories, their relative
ordering, and their interaction with other grammatical
categories, such as illocution, epistemic modality, negation,
and tense can be understood and described systematically if
the above, layered, approach to evidentiality is taken.
Finally, we will argue that the
major distinction between direct and indirect evidentials that
is commonly postulated in the evidentiality literature (e.g.
Willett 1988, Aikhenvald 2004), can be better explained in
terms of the distinct nature of the layers within the
interpersonal and the representational levels at which an
evidential category applies.
|