We investigated how bilingual speakers process evidentiality information in a dual language activation setting (Green & Abutalebi, 2013) using a translation production and confidence judgment task. Due to interaction of multiple factors in bilingual processing a multifactor model CASP (Complex Adaptive System Principles) for Bilingualism (Filipović & Hawkins, 2019) was used as a theoretical frame. Evidentiality indicates the source of information about past events, i.e., whether they were witnessed firsthand or non-firsthand and it is marked obligatorily in the grammar of Turkish and optionally in English using verbs, adverbs or constructions. The results show that firsthand information is translated more correctly than the non-firsthand in both directions and that different bilingual populations all gravitate towards a shared pattern in both languages but in different ways due to the different proficiency (English vs. Turkish as the stronger (L1) language) and different acquisition histories (early heritage vs. migrant late bilingualism).

This article argues that the data on English evidential markers indicate that evidentiality is not a grammatical category which is only applicable to some languages, but can be considered a universal semantic function that tends to trigger the grammaticalization of lexical forms. This study investigates five criteria that can help us locate linguistic forms on the lexicon–grammar continuum: reduction, desemanticization, backgrounding, decategorialization and paradigmatization. Although it has not reached the full maturity of so-called ‘evidential languages’, English provides evidence of the grammaticalization of evidentiality. Evidentiality is thus a relevant notion for English which substantially impacts the organization of the lexicon of the language, and the evolution of its grammar.

This article examines evidentiality in the frame of inferential adverbs in written interaction from the perspective of Finnish, a language that does not have evidentiality as a grammatical category. The analysis focuses on six adverbs, such as käsittääkseni ‘as far as I understand’ and tietääkseni ‘to my knowledge, as far as I know’. Evidentiality and epistemic modality intertwine in their semantics, as these adverbs represent a writer’s access to information, but also indicate her evaluation of its reliability. First, this article offers a description of the interactional functions of these adverbs such as marking a writer’s opinion in contrasts, expressing slight hedging in order to anticipate corrections, to allow space for other opinions, or to create irony. Second, in the framework of cognitive grammar, the analysis focuses on the meaning of the evidential verb+kseni construction and the effect of different verb stems on it. These adverbs share similar functions in texts, which is due to their flexible constructional meaning. While varying from lexeme to lexeme, specific evidential and epistemic dimensions can either be foregrounded and relevant in a situation or remain backgrounded and not activated.

The collection of papers presented in this special issue addresses the non-temporal import of aspectual constructions, in conventional and less conventional contexts and expression modes. In this introduction, we outline the notions of lexical and grammatical aspect, and how they are traditionally analyzed in temporal accounts, which focus on situations’ temporal constituency, duration, and limitation in time. This serves to clarify relevant notions for those readers who are less familiar with the domain (admittedly riddled with terminological confusion) and thus explicate some of the underlying tenets of existing (temporal) accounts, which the papers in this special issue call into question. This questioning, alongside insights coming from the discussion of various non-canonical constructions/uses in different languages and from different theoretical perspectives, promises an alternative approach to aspect, which goes beyond time.

We examine the constellation of factors – lexical, aspectual, temporal and conversational – that give rise to evidential implications from assertions. We target intensional and inferential meanings associated with a certain class of present-tense state sentences: those containing a temporal adverb headed by by, e.g. The American traveling public is pretty mature by now. We ask why present-tense sentences containing by temporal adverbs (BTAs) are improved by, and sometimes appear to require, an epistemic modal, e.g. They ??(must) live in a mansion by now. Key to our analysis is the idea that BTA sentences require the onset of a resultant state described by the complement of by now to overlap some unspecified time that precedes the time described by the adverb. The indefiniteness of the unspecified time described by BTAs leads interpreters to pragmatically construe present-tense BTA reports as conjectures, guesses or suppositions. We show how our analysis can be extended to incorporate the contribution of epistemic modals. Adopting insights from von Fintel & Gillies (2010) and Mandelkern (2016), we hypothesize the manner in which the BTA change schema is instantiated in intensional contexts and discuss the relationship between intensional and evidential contexts. We see the merging of aspectual and epistemic features in BTA sentences, and in particular present-tense sentences, as the result of a semantic reconciliation procedure: the use of an epistemic modal in a BTA predication evokes an observation or act of reasoning, prior to speech time, which permits the speaker to make her assertion, and this inference trigger is identified with the ‘onset event’ in the BTA schema.

The present article argues that temporality can be computed indirectly via evidentiality, and that this is the case for Paraguayan Guaraní, a tenseless language. To model the evidential–temporal connection, we employ features from the domains of person (author, participant) and general deixis (proximate, distal). We discuss in detail the case of two evidential morphemes: indirect evidential ra'e and reportative raka'e. We argue that these particles do not have temporal semantics; rather their temporal contribution is due to the interaction of person features that determine the type of evidentiality and deictic features incorporated into the person system.

Mirative expressions, which mark surprising information (DeLancey 1997), are often expressed through linguistic forms that are also used to encode other, seemingly unrelated, meanings – e.g. evidential markers that mark lack of direct evidence (Turkish: Slobin & Aksu 1982, Peterson 2010; Cheyenne: Rett & Murray 2013; Cuzco Quechua: Faller 2002; Ostyak: Nikolaeva 1999; among others). In this paper, we show that the English particle like features a parallel polysemy between a mirative use and its better-known hedging use, which expresses weakened commitment to the strict denotation of a linguistic expression. After presenting several diagnostics that point to a genuine empirical difference between the hedging and mirative functions of like, we propose that both uses widen the size of a contextually restricted set, admitting elements that were previously excluded. More specifically, hedging like expands the set of ‘similar enough’ interpretations that we can apply to a linguistic expression in a context, including interpretations that we would normally consider to be too different from the context at hand. Mirative like, on the other hand, expands the set of worlds that we are willing to consider as candidates for the actual world in the conversation, resulting in the inclusion of worlds that interlocutors have previously ruled out due to perceived outlandishness. We therefore suggest that the two uses are best treated as sharing a common semantic kernel, deriving hedging and mirativity as effects of the particular type of object to which like applies.

In languages with evidential marking, utterances consist of an informational content and a specification of the mode of access to that information. In this first longitudinal study investigating the acquisition of the Turkish evidential marker −mIş in naturalistic child–caregiver interactions, we examined six children between 8 and 36 months of age. We charted individual differences in child and caregiver speech over time by conducting growth curve analyses. Children followed a similar course of acquisition in terms of the proportion of the marker in overall speech. However, children exhibited differences with respect to the order of emergence of different evidential functions (e.g., inference, hearsay), where each child showed a unique pattern irrespective of the frequency in caregiver input. Nonfactual use of the marker was very frequent in child and caregiver speech, where high-SES caregivers mostly produced the marker during story-telling and pretend play, and low-SES caregivers for regulating the child's behavior.

In the current study, we examined how adult heritage and monolingual speakers of Turkish process evidentiality (the linguistic expression of information source) through finite verb inflections and time reference, expressed on non-finite participles. A sentence-verification task was used to measure participants’ sensitivity to evidentiality and time-reference violations in Turkish. Our findings showed that the heritage speakers were less accurate and slower than the monolinguals in responding to both evidentiality and time-reference violations. Also, the heritage speakers made more errors and had longer RTs when responding to evidentiality violations as compared to time-reference violations. The monolinguals had longer RTs (and more accurate responses) to time reference than to evidentiality violations. This study shows that evidentiality is susceptible to incomplete acquisition in Turkish heritage speakers. It is suggested that the requirement for simultaneous processing at different linguistic levels makes the evidentiality markers vulnerable.

This short communication is a brief extension of recent work on verb second (V2) in Scandinavian declarative clauses and a contribution to research on the relation between V2 and illocutionary force. It is argued that Swedish data present a problem for the hypothesis that a bi-conditional relation holds between the illocutionary force of an assertion and V2 word order. The relevant force, to the extent that we can identify it, appears to be available also in the absence of V2 word order. It is tentatively suggested that V2 encodes evidentiality.

This article investigates how participants in broadcast news interviews display their orientations to a social distribution of knowledge regarding newsworthy events and actors. Interviewers treat the nature, grounds, and limits of interviewees' knowledge as accountable matters. The article employs single-case and quantitative analyses to show that, in and through the design of their questions, interviewers distinguish between (i) interviewees as subject-actors who are responsible for direct, first-hand knowledge of their own conduct; and (ii) interviewees as commentators who, on the basis of indirect, second-hand knowledge, are entitled to opinions about third parties' conduct. This distinction serves as a basis for the production of interviewees' responses as talk that expresses either matters of fact or points of opinion. The article examines how these aspects of question design establish relevancies for interviewees' responses and, ultimately, shape news content.