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Evidentiality—A Cultural Interpretation

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Advances in Cultural Linguistics

Part of the book series: Cultural Linguistics ((CL))

Abstract

Evidentiality is the object of an ever-increasing number of studies from different linguistic persuasions. This chapter focuses on its cultural interpretation and explanation in the framework of Cultural Linguistics. A first section is devoted to the main theoretical ideas that conform the paper, emphasising the need to consider evidentiality as it is used in communication, not as a category (grammatical or lexical) taken in isolation. Moreover, a purely grammatical analysis in the absence of any context makes it impossible to identify possible links between language and culture. The second section reviews the concept of Evidentiality and analyses its functioning in real texts of several languages, with systems ranging from compulsory grammatical evidentiality to its marking by means of particles or specific syntactic constructions. In all cases the result is that the evidential marking is context- and discourse-dependent: some depend on the text-type involved, some belong to the written language while others are exclusive of the colloquial, spoken language; even religion can play a role in the selection of the evidential used. A final section presents a possible interpretation in terms of cultural scripts and conceptualisations.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    All translations are by the author of this chapter, unless indicated otherwise. The translations of the examples are as much literal as possible, with no aim to idiomaticity in English.

  2. 2.

    McNealy’ translation.

  3. 3.

    As one of my referees pointed out, this may be due to conscious and long-standing effort on the part of the catholic priests who tried to avoid their teachings to be expressed as simple stories: they had to be seen and expressed as real and undeniable. I fully agree with this view. On the other hand, cfr. the absence of evidentials in the Navajo ritual chants (yeibichai): even in the narrative passages, jiní is absent, probably because the chants are assumed to correspond to reality, albeit a different one from our own. See Aikhenvald (2004: 344ff.) and Lazard (2001: 366).

  4. 4.

    The literature on the topic is immense; the following touch it from different but coherent perspectives and have proved useful for some ideas introduced and developed in the present paper: Bernárdez (2008a, 2016), Hammarström (2016), Handwerker (2002), Maffi (2005), Sidnell and Enfield (2012).

  5. 5.

    The main reference could be Ekberg and Paradis (2009).

  6. 6.

    “They have evidentials because in the forest you cannot see anything”, Elsa Gómez-Imbert, a Colombian specialist in Tucano, explained (in an informal way) at the International Linguistics Conference in Bogotá, Colombia, September 2014. Also in the Chachi forest visibility is extremely limited, as I witnessed myself.

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  1. Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    Enrique Bernárdez

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  1. Enrique Bernárdez
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Correspondence to Enrique Bernárdez .

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  1. Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

    Farzad Sharifian

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Bernárdez, E. (2017). Evidentiality—A Cultural Interpretation. In: Sharifian, F. (eds) Advances in Cultural Linguistics. Cultural Linguistics. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4056-6_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4056-6_20

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