The Oxford Handbook of Evidentiality - Paperback

by Alexandra Aikhenvald (Editor)

The Oxford Handbook of Evidentiality offers a thorough, systematic, and crosslinguistic account of evidentiality, the linguistic encoding of the source of information on which a statement is based. In some languages, the speaker always has to specify this source - for example whether they saw the event, heard it, inferred it based on visual evidence or common sense, or was told about it by someone else. While not all languages have obligatory marking of this type, every language has ways of referring to information source and associated epistemological meanings. The continuum of epistemological expressions covers a range of devices from the lexical means in familiar European languages and in many languages of Aboriginal Australia to the highly grammaticalized systems in Amazonia or North America. In this handbook, experts from a variety of fields explore topics such as the relationship between evidentials and epistemic modality, contact-induced changes in evidential systems, the acquisition of evidentials, and formal semantic theories of evidentiality. The Oxford Handbook of Evidentiality also contains detailed case studies of evidentiality in language families across the world, including Algonquian, Korean, Nakh-Dagestanian, Nambikwara, Turkic, Uralic, and Uto-Aztecan.

Author Biography

Alexandra Aikhenvald, Laureate Fellow and Professor at the Jawun Research Centre, Central Queensland University

Aikhenvald is a major authority on languages of the Arawak family, from northern Amazonia, and has written grammars of Bare (1995) and Warekena (1998), plus A Grammar of Tariana, from Northwest Amazonia (CUP, 2003), and The Manambu language of East Sepik, Papua New Guinea (OUP, 2008) in addition to essays on various typological and areal topics, and numerous edited volumes. Her other major publications include Evidentiality (OUP, 2004), Imperatives and Commands (OUP, 2010), Languages of the Amazon (OUP, 2012), The Art of Grammar (OUP, 2014), How gender shapes the world (OUP, 2016), Serial verbs (OUP, 2018), The web of knowledge: evidentiality at the cross-roads (Brill, 2021), I saw the dog: how language works (Profile Books, 2021), and A guide to gender and classifiers (OUP, forthcoming).