Evidentiality

As evidentiality is called in linguistics in an utterance with grammatical means expressed indication of where the speaker has knowledge of the information contained in his statement.

About a quarter of all world languages ​​marked evidentiality. In Quechua, the marking of evidentiality is, for example, mandatory. That is, the speaker must be in Quechua indicate at each statement with the help of suffixes, if he himself is the source of knowledge ( direct evidence, expressed with -m/-mi ) or if he has heard the information from other ( indirect evidence, expressed with -sh/-shi or, in the southern Quechua, -s/-si ). In addition, there is the suffix -ch/-cha, is expressed with the doubt ( "perhaps", "likely" ).

A common misconception is the relationship between evidentiality and truth. Evidentiality does not limit the validity of the statement and the speaker used an indirect Evidentialmarkierung not to distance themselves from the message content, but it's all about the source of information. In contrast, when a speaker uses a false statement in a Evidentialmarkierung, his fellows would probably accuse him of lying, for example, because he falsely pretends that he was doing (or not there ).

There are several Evidentialsysteme with different numbers of subdivisions for evidentiality. Are possible, for example, the following information: seen, heard tell, get, Conclusion etc.