Evident: evidentiality
| Values: | Fh | Nfh |
Evidentiality is the morphological marking of a speaker’s source of information (Aikhenvald, 2004). It is sometimes viewed as a category of mood and modality.
Many different values are attested in the world’s languages. At present we only cover the firsthand vs. non-firsthand distinction, needed in Turkish. It distinguishes there the normal past tense (firsthand, also definite past tense, seen past tense) from the so-called miş-past (non-firsthand, renarrative, indefinite, heard past tense).
Aikhenvald also distinguishes reported evidentiality, occurring in Estonian and Latvian, among others. We currently use the quotative Mood for this.
Note: Evident is a new universal feature in UD version 2. It was used as
a language-specific feature (under the name Evidentiality) in UD v1 for Turkish.
Fh: firsthand
Examples
- [tr] geldi “he/she/it came” (and I was there and saw them coming)
Nfh: non-firsthand
Examples
- [tr] gelmiş “he/she/it has come” (I did not witness them coming but I know it because someone told me / because I see that they are there now)
References
- Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2004. Evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Evident in other languages: [ab] [bor] [dar] [gub] [jaa] [ka] [ky] [tr] [u]