13th ICFG 2008
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Abstracts
13th International Conference on Functional Grammar

Evidentiality in Functional Discourse Grammar
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 t
he 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.

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References:
  • Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2004. Evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  • Dik, Simon C. & Hengeveld, Kees 1991. The hierarchical structure of the clause and the typology of perception verb complements. Linguistics 29.2, 231-259.

  • Hengeveld, Kees & Mackenzie, J. Lachlan  2008. Functional Discourse Grammar: A typologically-based theory of language structure. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  • Willett, Thomas 1988. A cross-linguistic survey of the grammaticization of evidentiality. Studies in Language 12: 51-97.


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