Tag: Evidentiality

An open field-linguistics notebook showing a diagram of evidential source types branching from a central verb marker: an eye for visual evidence, an ear for auditory evidence, footprints for inferred evidence, a speech bubble for secondhand report, and a thinking head for assumption, with a faded world map in the background highlighting South America, the Caucasus, and the Himalayas where grammatical evidentiality is concentrated.

How Does a Language Force You to Say How You Know?

In about a quarter of the world’s languages, every sentence about the past must grammatically specify whether the speaker saw it, heard it, inferred it, or was only told — and a 2013 study found that habit measurably changes what speakers remember.

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