Evidential (information source marker) systems in language belong to semantic categories that rely on epistemological notions: their distinctions express whether some information was personally witnessed, inferred from partial cues, or merely learned from an indirect source (eg. reading the news), and (occasionally) other kinds of sources. Interestingly, the most common tendency in languages with evidentials is to mark reported source, and leave other sources unmarked, and this might be due to an informative communicative intention to flag more unreliable sources (Saratsli & Papafragou, 2023).
For example, if I read in the news that someone tried to assassinate Trump once again, and then later share this information with a friend using the word “allegedly” to preface my statement, it is because I represent not only the information itself, but also how I came to learn about it. Additionally, the reason for my adding this word might be an intention to flag the somewhat unreliable (indirect) source of the shared information. Then, for my friend to understand my meaning, their decoding also needs to rely on metarepresentation, and a third-order metarepresentation this time: they need to represent not only the event involving Trump and how I learned about it, but also that it is me representing all this – after all, I could be mistaken for some reason (maybe I read it on an untrustworthy news portal), or my friend might have some other reason not to trust me (Sperber et al, 2010). Consequently, how evidential concepts are shared and understood largely depends on these pragmatic (communicative) dynamics that may well be rooted in our ability to form metarepresentations (Leslie, 1987).
Thus, relying on this theory has the potential to inform the essential aspects of my research related to how evidential systems are used, learned and understood in communicative context.
Leslie, A. M. (1987). Pretense and representation: The origins of “theory of mind.” Psychological Review, 94, 412–26.
Saratsli, D. and Papafragou, A. (2023) ‘Pragmatic effects on semantic learnability: Insights from evidentiality’, Journal of Memory and Language, 131, p. 104426.
Sperber, D. et al. (2010) ‘Epistemic vigilance’, Mind & Language, 25(4), pp. 359–393.