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Transcript Episode 32: You heard about it but I was there - Evidentiality

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 32: You heard about it but I was there - Evidentiality. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 32 show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. And today, we’re getting enthusiastic about indicating how we know things, which is “evidentiality.” But first, we want to take this opportunity to remind you that we currently have 27 bonus episodes on our Patreon with new bonuses coming every month.

Gretchen: Yes! You can go there and listen to new bonus episodes like animal communication, how the internet is making English better (a recording from our live show in Melbourne), and do you adjust the way you talk to match other people, and more – all help keeping the show going, keeping the show ad-free, and giving you almost twice as much Lingthusiasm to listen to.

Lauren: We also have brand-new merch for you to adorn yourself with, or to adorn your office with, or adorn your classes with.

Gretchen: We have made a scarf and a few other objects with some of our favourite weird and esoteric symbols from editing symbols, math symbols, music symbols, punctuation marks, and more. It’s like the International Phonetic Alphabet scarf but with other weird symbols that you may enjoy.

Lauren: We’ve also made a baby onesie that says, “little longitudinal language acquisition project” for all of you who are embarking on or have family members and friends embarking on their own long-term little longitudinal language acquisition projects.

Gretchen: You can check out the photos on our website at lingthusiasm.com/merch or link in the show notes to see photos of those items and where you can get them.

[Music]

Gretchen: So, if I say something like, “Oh, my god! Harry got a new broomstick!”

Lauren: This is obviously the world in which we are both associate professors at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Gretchen: They’ve introduced a linguistics course, what can I say? They brought us in to teach it.

Lauren: I’m so excited. That is definitely news. Harry has a new broomstick. Did you see the new broomstick? Is that how you know? Is why that why you’re telling…

Gretchen: Definitely one thing I could say would be, “Yes! Yes, I saw it! It’s great. It’s a Nimbus 2000.” But another thing I can also say was, “No. But I heard him flying on it, and it sounds fancier than his old one.”

Lauren: Right. In that case, you haven’t seen it, but you’ve heard it. So, you know that there’s a new one.

Gretchen: Yeah. I know it’s a new one. Broomsticks have a distinctive sound – who knew? They definitely do. Or I could say, “No. But Hermione told me.”

Lauren: Obviously.

Gretchen: Because she knows everything.

Lauren: Because she knows everything – yeah.

Gretchen: Or I might say, “No. I didn’t see it, but I saw the packaging for it.” I knew that he’d gotten it. Or I could say, “No. I didn’t see it, but he left his old one in his room while he was at Quidditch practice, so I inferred that he must’ve gotten a new one.”

Lauren: Right. And in this case, your evidence is not as direct. You haven’t got absolute proof. He may have just decided his was broken and he was gonna borrow a spare one.

Gretchen: Right. Or maybe he got sick or something. Something could have definitely come up. Or I could be even less certain and say, “No. But I read it in the tea leaves,” or, “I saw it in a dream.”

Lauren: You must be very good at divination.

Gretchen: What can I say? It’s one of my many talents. Or I might say, “No. I didn’t see it, but Harry gets a new broom every year – or every book – and so I’ve inferred that he must be getting a new one as well this year.”

Lauren: Right – based on kind of inferred evidence of habitual reality.

Gretchen: Yeah. Normally, he gets a new broomstick. Harry got a new broomstick again.

Lauren: All of these are different sources of evidence. You have different evidence to show that you believe this claim to be true. But you don’t necessarily say that overtly. When people gossip, they do that all the time. All the time someone will be like “Omg! This thing happened.” And you’ll be like “Oh, my god! Did you see that happen?” And then they’ll be like “Uh, no. I just heard about it.”

Gretchen: Yeah. “Did you know that this person’s been stealing all of the cookies from the cookie jar?” Like “Wait, no, did you see them?” “No, but they had crumbs on their shirt.” “Oh! Maybe that was this person.”

Lauren: Guilty.

Gretchen: Guilty as charged. I saw them sneaking out of the room with a suspicious look on their face. I like this Harry Potter example because it sets up a world where we can have this kind of gossip and we can make these kinds of inferences. But we do this all the time.

Lauren: And when we do give more evidence, when we explain how we know it, like in all of those examples, in English we just have to add an extra phrase or some extra words. But this isn’t the case for all languages. There are some languages where it’s actually part of the grammatical system. You have to choose a grammatical form that explains how you know the information in the sentence that you’re saying.

Gretchen: In the same way that, in English, we need to choose a time when something happened anytime you say something. I can’t just say, “Harry get a new broomstick,” to mean, “He got one,” or “He will get one,” or “He has one now,” “He is getting one currently.” I have to pick between which of those kinds of getting he wants to. But in some languages, while you can specify the time by using words like “yesterday” or “tomorrow” or “recently” or “a long time ago,” you don’t have to. In English, you have to specify when something happened.

Lauren: It would be a bit like if we got a new suffix on a verb like “got.” So, it’s something like “Harry got-saw a new broomstick” or “Harry got-heard a new broomstick.” And you have to use that.

Gretchen: That could mean, “I saw that he got it” or “I heard that he got it.”

Lauren: Yeah. It’s not a particularly attractive – I feel like we could definitely find a nicer way of putting that into our grammar if we wanted to, but that’s a very crude example.

Gretchen: I feel like I’d like to make some sort of shortened version of “apparently” because I think I use “apparently” a lot for like “I’m not really confident about the source of this evidence.”

Lauren: “Harry got-apps.”

Gretchen: Yeah. Like “per” – “Harry per-got a new broomstick,” which could short for “apparently” or something.

Lauren: I like that you’re putting it as a prefix instead of a suffix.

Gretchen: I don’t think we have enough prefixes, grammatically, in English. I want some more prefixes.

Lauren: No, you’re right.

Gretchen: I don’t think that’s how grammar works, but it’s okay.

Lauren: So, it can be a prefix. It can be a suffix. It could be a completely different form of the verb. In some languages, they’re particles. But they’re part of the grammar instead of being a word that you choose. This happens across – the most inflated claim I’ve heard is that 25% of the world’s languages have some form of grammatical evidentiality.

Gretchen: Wow!

Lauren: A lot of those languages are very small language families and groups spoken in the Amazon, and in the Tibetan area, across Papua New Guinea, and the Balkans – are kind of the four big areas people talk about. But you also find quite a few languages from North America. Very occasional languages in, say, Australia also have at least one grammatical evidential.

Gretchen: Yeah. I don’t think I speak any languages that have evidential markers. But the European languages don’t have to have them and those are most of the languages that I speak.

Lauren: No. They’re missing out, those European languages.

Gretchen: You’ve done some research on evidentials, right?

Lauren: That is correct. My PhD thesis was all about evidentials in a Tibetan language spoken in Nepal called Yolmo. I was interested in understanding what different types of options they had for evidentiality but also how people choose to use them strategically in conversations – so how people use them in that kind of gossipy context. Tibetan languages are interesting because, as well as all those categories we talked about in terms of the evidence for Harry’s new broomstick, there’s also an evidential form that Harry could use if he got a new broomstick.

Gretchen: “I got a new broomstick myself (I know it because it happened to me)?”

Lauren: Yeah. He wouldn’t have to use something like “I saw myself get a new broomstick.” That would be quite unusual.

Gretchen: It would be kind of weird – yeah.

Lauren: And in fact, he can use it. But if he used the form that’s the equivalent of “I saw it,” it would be kind of like an English form of “Oh, I see I have a new broomstick!” It’s new information. It’s a bit unexpected.

Gretchen: Could you do that in something like “Harry got me a new broomstick”? And so I’m directly involved in this – I can see that he got it for me?

Lauren: Yeah. Because it’s an event you participated in. In some Tibetan languages it’s really specific who you’re allowed to talk about using this form. It’s a bit more flexible in Yolmo. But it means that people have these options between something that they perceive either by sight or taste or smell or something that they know from their personal experience. There’s also a form that you can use if you’re less certain, which is less about evidence and more about just how certain you are. And one of my favourites, which is not used that often, but it’s one that’s like “information that is so obvious everybody knows it.”

Gretchen: Like “It’s daytime” or something?

Lauren: “Harry Potter is a wizard.”

Gretchen: Right. Okay. Everyone knows this. They don’t have to say, “J.K. Rowling told me that Harry Potter is a wizard.”

Lauren: Yeah. A lot of the examples that I got from people are things like “sugar is sweet,” “lemons are sour.”

Gretchen: Right.

Lauren: Just, like, “This is such obvious, general facts about the world.”

Gretchen: Or, “This is the town we live in.”

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Everyone knows we’re in this town.

Lauren: But even then, that’s not a kind of – I don’t wanna say the “universal” because that’s a dangerous word – but…

Gretchen: It’s not self-evident?

Lauren: It’s not as self-evident as something like “Tea is tasty,” which is taken as a generally given fact. They also have a little particle that you can use to say that something is reported from somewhere else. And that’s just “ló.” When it comes to telling stories, when you’ve heard stuff from people, it would just be so efficient if you could just have a little “ló” at the end when you’re telling gossip.

Gretchen: Yeah. Because then you know this is still the story and you know that you’re not taking credit for knowing it yourself directly.

Lauren: Yeah. You’re just passing on the gossip. So, those are the forms that I was looking at. I was looking at how people used them in things like reporting stories from other people but also in how you ask questions.

Gretchen: How do you use evidentials to ask questions?

Lauren: It varies across different languages. Sometimes, you just use a base form or a neutral form or a question form. But in Tibetan languages, you use the form of the evidential that you think someone is gonna answer with. So, if I was gonna ask you, “Did Harry get a new broom?” if you went to Quidditch practice a lot, I might ask you using the one for “Did you see this directly?” “Did you see Harry got a new broom?”

Gretchen: Right. Whereas, otherwise you might say, “Did you hear whether Harry got a new broom?” or “Did you hear that Harry got a new broom?” “Do you think that…?” “Can you infer that…?”

Lauren: Yeah. Or it’s that time of year where Harry always breaks his broom and someone buys him a new one, I might use the “Did Harry get a new broom as per the standard pattern of behaviour?”

Gretchen: Right. I mean, you can kind of do this if you really want to in English. You can say, “Do you suppose Harry got a new broom again?” or “Do you reckon Harry got a new broom?” But it’s not obligatory – yeah.

Lauren: Yeah. The important thing about evidentials is not that it’s impossible to do this in English, it’s just because it’s baked into the grammar –

Gretchen: Right. You have to do it.

Lauren: – it crops up all the time. The cool thing is, because you have to use the evidential that you think someone’s gonna use in their answer, you basically have to do this kind of context-reading prediction of what evidence you think they’re gonna have, or what would be the best evidence to have for asking a particular question and getting particular information.

Gretchen: You end up taking on their perspective of “What do I assume that this person likely knows?” or “How do I assume that this person gets their information?”

Lauren: Yeah. And the person doesn’t have to answer – if they don’t have that level of evidence, they’ll reply with something else. But it’s a nifty interactional trick if you think about it.

Gretchen: Do you have to use the one that’s the most certain of the pieces of evidence that you think they have?

Lauren: No, you use the one that you think is the best fit.

Gretchen: The most likely – okay.

Lauren: Yeah. Certainty is complex because for a lot of things you might think that having direct – that direct “I saw” evidence is the best. But there are some situations where it would be rude to presume that I have that direct evidence. So, for example, if someone asked me if you were hungry – they said, “Is Gretchen hungry?” – it would actually be rude for them to ask if I had direct evidence because the only direct evidence you have is your personal feeling of hunger. They would ask me using the reported-speech form or the less-direct form.

Gretchen: Like “Did Gretchen tell you she was hungry?” or “Do you infer Gretchen is probably hungry because you know it’s been five hours since she ate?”

Lauren: We have this idea that more direct evidence is good. It was interesting when we were building that list of examples, you were ordering them instinctively in a way that you saw as more-evidence, and more certain, and more direct from “I saw it” to –

Gretchen: Yeah. Whereas, you’re the one that’s done the evidential literature, and I was like “I just feel like these should go in an order.”

Lauren: That order pretty much matches up with what a lot of the literature says in terms of a hierarchy of evidence being better or higher-quality or something. But if you actually look at the interactional choices people make when they’re chatting, sometimes it’s better that you don’t use something that’s more certain or more direct because it’s rude or presumptive.

Gretchen: Yeah. Can you use this type of thing to be polite as well? If I say, “I wonder if you could possibly open the window?” it’s not that I’m actually wondering about your ability to open the window, it’s more that I’m trying to make an indirect request. Can you use evidentials like that?

Lauren: There’s definitely times where it’s more appropriate to ask questions or to state things using more-direct evidence and there are times where it’s better to state things using less-direct evidence. And in that case, politeness does come into it.

Gretchen: This seems like the kind of question that people probably ask is “Well, if you have evidentials, does that mean that people can’t lie?” But surely people could use an evidential they don’t actually have evidence for if they wanna lie, right?

Lauren: Yeah. I guess, you could potentially try and send people off track by using an inferred evidential when you actually witness something or vice versa. People can definitely use them. Just because they mark the source of evidence doesn’t mean you have to always use the one that you definitely have evidence for.

Gretchen: If I say that I saw you stealing the cookies from me, that doesn’t actually mean that I actually saw it, it just means that I’m saying that I saw it.

Lauren: Yeah. Or there’s an anecdote in my thesis where I talk about going to a wedding with a bunch of people when I was doing field work. As they were going around servicing – at a wedding you traditionally – like any wedding across the world, it’s the do you want the chicken or the fish? You feed people a lot of meat. And you feed them a lot of booze. And it’s a big party. And one of the women, who was being very silly and joking around, and whenever they came around would say, “She eats meat,” and would use the reported form to suggest that I had said that I eat meat. They’re like, “Oh, yeah. She eats meat. Oh, yeah, she drinks heaps,” which as a teetotaling vegetarian – they know I’m a teetotaling vegetarian because they find it very funny. So, putting these words in my mouth was a big, hilarious joke for them. But they didn’t honestly believe that I’d said that.

Gretchen: Right, right, right. They were using that to make fun of you, as you do.

Lauren: Yeah. The other really nifty example I have is there was a time where I agreed to something by nodding my head, which everyone understood. And then later someone was like “Oh, she said ‘Yes’” – reported speech.

Gretchen: Right. Whereas, the literal word you said wasn’t “Yes,” but…

Lauren: It’s not a verbatim, court of law, “This is exactly that you said.” It’s a general intent reporting.

Gretchen: Are there cognitive effects of having evidentials? Do people remember source of information better or something?

Lauren: I still personally haven’t seen a study that really convinces me of that. But there’s some really cute studies in children and how children acquire evidentiality. They’ve done this in Turkish and Tibetan, and the general indication is children can start using them relatively young, from like 3 or 4 years of age, but often when they’re really young, they haven’t entirely figured out what the evidentials are doing in terms of what they’re marking. They tend to use them to indicate that they’re more or less certain. Certainty is definitely tied up in things. If you saw Harry had a new broomstick, you would feel more certain about it than if there was some rubbish outside.

Gretchen: The packaging or whatever.

Lauren: The kind of – in the corridor. Because that packaging could technically belong to someone else even if no one else really rides broomsticks in that dormitory. But then, just because you have that direct evidence, it could still be wrong. Harry could be borrowing someone else’s new broomstick. The literature on evidentiality often mentions that certainty is an inferred part of using particular evidentials, but it doesn’t have to be. Children tend to latch onto this certainty idea when they first start using them and then they kind of refine what they’re doing with them.

Gretchen: That’s so cute. It reminds me of how children acquire numbers and time durations and stuff.

Lauren: Ah, yeah. We talked about that in our time episode.

Gretchen: Yeah. We talked about that children know that an hour is longer than a minute, but they don’t know that one hour is longer than two minutes because maybe that’s more.

Lauren: Two is a bigger number than one.

Gretchen: Exactly. Or three minutes might be longer than two hours because – oh, god. I dunno! They have some sense of the magnitudes, but they don’t have exact computations to get them.

Lauren: Because children see their parents and other adult users of the languages using these evidentials in situations that seem more certain because it’s right there. That’s how they start using them.

Gretchen: And children are often missing out on the type of social information that we’ve acquired to be like “Well, actually I can infer this because I have this social information about what the package looks like that this comes in,” or “I know who knows who’s talked to who,” or something like that. Children are often missing this social information sometimes.

Lauren: That’s a lot to keep in your head even as an adult.

Gretchen: How does a language start getting evidentials? Where do they tend to come from? Are they other words that get shortened, or are they words that formally meant something to do with time or something else, or where does evidentiality come from in a language?

Lauren: One of the really great things about studying evidentiality in the Tibetan languages is that Tibetan has a pretty comparable literary history to English. It’s also unsurprising, then, that it has a similarly monstrous relationship between letters and sounds as English does.

Gretchen: The older the writing system, the less logical it is. It’s just true.

Lauren: So many silent letters. And so that’s really handy because we can see in old, written Tibetan from 800, 900 years ago that there weren’t these evidential forms. There were some older forms that have acquired evidential meaning. In other languages where we have the ability to trace it because of a literary history or because related languages have a similar form without evidentials meaning, one of the very common things that happens is a word that means something like “see” or “perceive” becomes – and especially for the reporting of speech evidence, a word that meant “say” or “talk” – becomes the grammatical form.

Gretchen: Right. Okay. That makes sense.

Lauren: For example, the Yolmo form is “ló” – that is from an older form that meant “to say.” And then a new verb that means “to say” has come into the language.

Gretchen: Kind of like how we might talk about hearsay evidence, which literally comes from the words “hear” and “say” and becomes an adjective instead.

Lauren: Yeah. That’s a really great example. A lot of the time it is taking from other words. And then sometimes, for example, the form that means that you know something from your own personal experience in Tibetan languages – the personal, the ego evidential – was a neutral, just general, good-old copula, but because these other forms came in, it created this paradigm that one got pushed there and that meaning was created for it.

Gretchen: Because it was like “Well, this used to be the normal way of saying something, but then if you don’t say ‘hear’ or ‘tell’ or ‘see,’ then the neutral one becomes the really strong form’”?

Lauren: It takes on that, yeah, very specific meaning.

Gretchen: There’s regions that tend to have evidentials in the Amazon, and Tibetan languages, Papua New Guinea, and the Balkans, are these because there’s a bunch of related languages in these areas that have evidential markers or do they spread from one language to another even if they aren’t necessarily related historically?

Lauren: There’s a few things that happen. One thing is that evidentiality does seem to be one of those things that goes across language families pretty well. If your neighbours are speaking an unrelated language but you speak it because you live in a multilingual society, which as we know is the norm across the world, you might be like, “Ah, that’s a really handy thing. I’m gonna borrow that into our language.” There are some really nice examples of borrowing across languages. Sometimes, it’s a form. We know that by Middle Tibetan a lot of these evidentials were starting to come into place and so a lot of the modern Tibetan languages spoken across Tibet, and India, and Nepal kind of have evidentiality because of this historic relationship.

Gretchen: And they borrow the specific words – or they borrow the idea of it but use their words – or some combination thereof?

Lauren: Yeah. Some of them it’s an evolution from an older language that had evidentiality. For some of them it’s contact that relates to it. But also we know that languages can develop evidentiality relatively quickly. It’s something once you kind of start with that category – so we’ve seen families where it evolves multiple times in different languages in the area. One reason that’s given for this as a hypothetical is that evidentiality tends to arise in small communities where people care about keeping track of information and knowledge and ownership of knowledge.

Gretchen: Right. I guess that makes sense, especially if you’re asking someone, “Have you seen this?” or “Have you heard this?” you don’t know what to expect from that person, which requires a lot of prior context. Whereas, if you interact with a lot of strangers, you don’t necessarily have that context for everybody.

Lauren: Yeah. And you’re very concerned about not intruding on someone’s knowledge or marking out very clearly how you know things, so you don’t make assumptions about people’s knowledge and what they know and what they don’t know. Some people have hypothesised that’s why it occurs a lot in smaller languages – even though it’s 25% of the world’s languages that have evidentials, it tends to not be those bigger languages because by the time you get to being a larger language where lots of people who are strangers are interacting, they don’t care as much about knowledge state and ownership of knowledge.

Gretchen: So, if you’re English or Mandarin or Arabic or something, you’re like, “Well, there’s lots of people who speak these. They’re spoken in big metropolises. You can’t have every shopkeeper know what everyone’s interior state is when they’re coming in to buy bread,” or something?

Lauren: Yeah. I think it can kind of explain why it happens in smaller languages, but I also feel like it’s shortchanging the potential of large languages. Tibetan is not a small language. It’s spoken by millions of people. It has a long, written tradition. So, I think it’s not the whole picture.

Gretchen: And because they seem to spread from language to language, that also suggests that maybe they’re easier to adopt. My favourite theory of evidentiality – which I don’t know if I actually believe this, but I’d like to believe it a lot – is that we’re developing a system of evidentiality using acronyms on the internet.

Lauren: Oh, okay! Share your theory with me.

Gretchen: I’m not committed to this theory, but I like the idea of it. And maybe someday it’ll be true. I think the example that I’m gonna use – because it’s a theory that I talked about on Tumblr five years ago and I still think it has some potential. The Tumblr-appropriate example that I had was “They’d make a terrible couple” because people talk about shipping a lot on Tumblr. I think you can say this with varying degrees of certainty or belief or emotion or knowledge or something. I don’t know if they quite qualify as evidentials because none of them mean, “I heard that…” or “I saw that…” but you can say something like “Tbh, they’d make a terrible couple” or “Imo, they’d make a terrible couple” or “Iirc, they’d make a terrible couple” or “Omg, they’d make a terrible couple.” This at least adds something – “To be honest” or “In my opinion” or “If I recall correctly” or “Oh my god.” This at least adds some sort of flavor to this. Again, this is very hypothetical theory and I’m not sure if it’s a real…

Lauren: Well, they’re definitely adding epistemics, so that’s more about the certainty stuff we were talking about. But certainty could be a gateway to evidence if we continue to use them.

Gretchen: Okay. So, we’re like the toddler version of evidentials where we’re putting certainty on?

Lauren: Potentially. This is potentially a gateway to evidence.

Gretchen: I like this.

Lauren: We just need to create a bunch of acronyms that are like “Isy” – “I saw yesterday.”

Gretchen: “Iht” – “I hear that.”

Lauren: Yeah. That’s a good one.

Gretchen: I don’t know if these are gonna catch on – “Ist” – “I see that.”

Lauren: “Itt” – “I think that.”

Gretchen: “Iit” – “I infer that”?

Lauren: Oh, yeah.

Gretchen: I mean, there’s “Til,” “Today I learned,” but that doesn’t commit to the source of the information.

Lauren: No.

Gretchen: Hmm. Okay. We’ve got some ways to go before internet acronyms become evidentials.

Lauren: I feel like we have a potential grammatical spot ripe for potential evidential development. I personally think we have another rich source of evidentials on the internet, which is something we all take for granted as a basic piece of architecture on the internet, but a hyperlink is, really, a lot of the time used to provide evidence for something you say – especially in journalistic use of hyperlinks.

Gretchen: Oh! I think I like this.

Lauren: If you say something like, “These two celebrities were seen out yesterday, but they’d make a terrible couple,” and it might link to something that’s an article that says why they’d make a terrible couple. That’s your evidence right there.

Gretchen: Or you can do the extra-strong version of that, which is “They’d make a terrible couple” but each of those words is linked separately to a different article.

Lauren: More evidence is stronger.

Gretchen: That’s like, I have four pieces of evidence – five pieces of evidence – one per word. Or “This company has been involved in many scandals,” and each of those words is separately linked to a scandal. And you just see that, and you don’t have to click on those, and you’re like “I know there have been a lot of scandals.”

Lauren: Or even if it’s just linked once, you feel more comfortable. I never click on hyperlinks in news stories, but I feel more assured that the journalist has evidence for things.

Gretchen: Yeah. I think I sometimes do this, especially if I’m making some sort of statement, maybe, that’s not as much of an opinion. But if I’m saying something like “Evidentials are a type of grammatical marker blah blah blah,” and I link the word “evidentials” to the Wikipedia article on evidentials, I’m like “Okay. I’ve done my due diligence. If someone wants to find out more information, they can.” You don’t just have to believe me. You can go look it up on Wikipedia.

Lauren: Yeah. It’s not the same because it does actually provide all that context. An evidential form just kind of lets people know what the status of the evidence is. But I think it’s interesting how we relate to them as online content.

Gretchen: That’s very interesting. You could argue that the academic citation is maybe another kind of evidential in that case because if I wanna say, “Evidentials are found in 25% of the world’s languages. Gawne (2015) says this” – I don’t know if you say it.

Lauren: Actually, you would cite “Aikhenvald 2004” but… Yes, you’re correct.

Gretchen: Okay. So, “(Aikhenvald 2004) Evidentials are found in 25% of the world’s languages,” and then even if I don’t actually go read Aikhenvald 2004, I know that this has been asserted in conjunction with that person.

Lauren: Yeah. It’s the “I have read that” evidential.

Gretchen: Yeah. Yeah. The other thing is, once you know about evidentials, I feel like you start noticing them everywhere.

Lauren: I definitely notice in English gossip. I’m always like “But how do you know that?” I’m always looking for them. Or I always notice when people do explicitly mark them.

Gretchen: Yeah. Once I started learning about them, I noticed myself saying “apparently” a lot because I wasn’t going to commit to the source of that. I noticed evidentials recently – or the English non-grammaticalised type of evidentials – in this book called The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie.

Lauren: Which is a great book. I read it on your recommendation and enjoyed it so much.

Gretchen: Excellent! The conceit of this book – this book is narrated by a tower, which is also a god. Anyway, it’s fantasy. And the thing about the magic system in this world is that if the object gods in this world say something, it has to be true because if it’s not true, then they will be automatically required to use their power to make it true.

Lauren: This is definitely a world where you don’t wanna lie with an evidential.

Gretchen: Yeah. And if that’s not possible, then the god dies.

Lauren: Awks.

Gretchen: Yeah. It’s not a world where you have this strict “You can’t lie,” it’s like “You can lie, but you’re in trouble if you do.” The human characters can lie, but the magical characters use speaking to create their magic. If you wanna make something true, you can just speak it true, which is kind of cool. But you also have to be very careful when you’re telling stories or something to qualify how you know something.

Lauren: Because you don’t wanna accidentally have not enough evidence and make something true.

Gretchen: Exactly. You don’t wanna accidentally say something that’s too ambitious, you know? So, this character spends a lot of time – the tower narrating the story, sometimes the tower will say, “This is a story I have been told. Here’s this blah blah blah story story.” With that frame, then they don’t have to do that much hedging.

Lauren: You know what? This is world that would be ripe for evidentials.

Gretchen: Exactly. It would be so much more economic because then they wouldn’t have to do all of this hedging in longer form, they could just add it onto the verb and there you go. Sometimes, they ask things in terms of questions rather than saying, “You found this strange?” – because they address specific other characters – “You found this strange?” or “You must’ve found this strange?”

Lauren: That’s making a lot of presumptions.

Gretchen: Because they don’t know whether the other character found it strange – yeah. Instead, they can ask it as a question, “Was it strange for you to hear this?” In the mind of reader, it’s like, “Okay. Well, it was probably strange.” But in terms of what the character’s actually asserting it shows up as, “Okay. You’re not asserting it because now it’s a question.”

Lauren: I would love to see this book translated into Tibetan.

Gretchen: Great! How do we make that happen? If you too would like to imagine what The Raven Tower might be like if the evidentials were more explicitly spelled out, I also did a live Tweet with some snippets from the book. You can follow along with that. We’ll link to that.

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm, and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Soundcloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts. And you can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA and esoteric symbol scarves, ties, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.

Gretchen: I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. To listen to bonus episodes and help keep the show ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Recent bonus topics include animal communication, internet linguistics, and linguistic accommodation. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our audio producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our editorial manager is Emily Gref, our music is Ancient Cities by The Triangles.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

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