Volume 19, Issue 2 -

This article presents a typological characterization of a class of demonstratives so far neglected in the literature: demonstrative verbs expressing manner. First, the morphological characteristics and syntactic behaviors of these demonstratives are examined to illustrate their verbal properties and to justify categorizing them as verbs. Next, their exophoric and endophoric roles in narratives and interactions are described. As their discourse usages closely replicate that of nominal demonstratives, we argue that demonstrative verbs belong to the class of demonstratives and propose to integrate them in a general typology of demonstratives.

This article examines theoretical and typological characterizations of evidentials. Based on the literature and newly analyzed data from Karuk (a Native American language of California), we argue that two properties are criterial: (i) marking source of evidence and (ii) membership in grammatical systems. Other properties vary crosslinguistically: presence of epistemic, illocutionary, or mirative meaning; speaker deixis; obligatoriness; complementarity of meaning with other items; and truth-conditionality. The values of these variable properties cannot be assumed but must be empirically determined for individual items and languages. Our characterization can serve as a guide for research, examination of the relationship between evidentiality and other categories, and typological work on evidentials.

Evidentiality – a grammatical expression of information source (Aikhenvald 2004, 2014a) – is often expressed on a clausal level, and its marking is associated with the verb. In a few languages, a noun phrase can acquire its own evidential specification. Evidentiality can be expressed autonomously, or be fused with another grammatical category, including aspect, tense, or mood for verbs, or spatial distance and topicality for noun phrases. We investigate interactions and dependencies between evidentiality and other grammatical categories, both verbal and nominal. A number of such dependencies is supported by the diachronic development and history of evidentials.

To gain more insight into evidentiality, the grammatical marking of information source, it is worth studying the category in its relation to other grammatical categories. This study explores tensed evidentials, morphemes in which tense and evidentiality are fused, in 36 languages from four macro-areas (North America, South America, Eurasia, and Papunesia). The study reveals several interactions between tense values and evidential values. As opposed to what has been claimed, firsthand future evidentials seem to exist. Visual and non-visual evidentials occur equally with present and past, whereas mental activity evidentials and reportative evidentials are much more limited to the past. These findings conform to the logic of tense: every type of evidentiality can be gathered in the past, whereas some are less suited for present or future. As a result, we find exceptionless implicational hierarchies of the form future ⊃ present ⊃ past for several evidential values.