Evidentiality

by Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald

In a number of languages, scattered across the world, every statement must contain a specification of the type of evidence on which it is based--whether the speaker saw it, or heard it, or inferred it from indirect evidence, or learnt it from somebody else. Of interest to any grammarian, the book discusses evidentiality, and the cognitive and sociolinguistic consequences of evidentiality in a language.

Genres: Linguistics

480 pages, Paperback

First published November 4, 2004

About the author

Alexandra Aikhenvald is a leading linguist and expert in linguistic typology and the Arawak language family, particularly the Tariana language of the Brazilian Amazon. Born in Russia, she studied at Moscow State University, mastering numerous ancient and modern languages, including Hittite, Sanskrit, Hebrew, and Yiddish. She earned her Cand. Sc. degree with research on Berber languages and published the first Russian grammar of modern Hebrew. Between 1989 and 1992, she conducted fieldwork in Brazil, learning several Indigenous languages and producing a grammar of Tariana. After moving to Australia in 1993, she held academic positions at ANU, La Trobe, and James Cook University, where she co-founded major research centers in linguistic typology and language and culture. Aikhenvald has worked extensively on language contact, classifiers, evidentials, and grammars of understudied languages. She has authored influential works on Manambu and Warekena and compiled a Tariana–Portuguese dictionary. She speaks numerous languages, including Tok Pisin, and has been recognized internationally, being elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (1999), awarded an Australian Laureate Fellowship (2012), and elected to the Academia Europaea (2021). She is currently a professorial research fellow at Central Queensland University.