1 Introduction

The Indo-Aryan language Bangla (also known as Bengali) shows a puzzling pattern whereby the same evidential particle naki can denote different evidential flavors based on its syntactic position and the speech act it occurs in. The interpretation that signals the presence of REPORTATIVE evidence is available when naki is in any clause-internal position, while the interpretation that signals the presence of INFERENTIAL evidence is only available when naki is clause-final. In addition, the latter is available only in polar questions, while the former is available in both polar questions and declarative statements. The pattern shown in (1) is taken from Mukherjee (2008), who makes the claim that only in the clause-medial position, the particle functions as an evidential (which she glossed as H/U (heard/uttered)) while in the clause-final position, the particle functions as an operator for a confirmation question (which she glossed as Confirm):

In this paper, I argue, contra Mukherjee, that naki is underlyingly one single lexical item that, in both positions, is crucially a marker of INDIRECT evidence (cf. Willett 1988’s evidential taxonomy; also see De Haan 1999; Rooryck 2001; Faller 2002; Aikhenvald 2004; Murray 2010). I argue that naki is sensitive to a “judge” parameter (cf. Lasersohn 2005; Stephenson 2007) that is available in the syntax. Naki will be argued to be base-generated in one single underlying position. I will demonstrate that different judges are syntactically made accessible to naki in specific syntactic configurations, which results in different evidential flavors in the semantics module. Crucial word order differences between the two instantiations of the evidential are shown to fall out from standard syntactic principles. This paper is solely about the syntactic contribution of naki. For a holistic view of naki at the syntax-semantics-pragmatics interfaces, see Bhadra (2017).

2 The empirical facts

Naki can occur in two positions in a clause – at the clause-final position and a clause-internal position. Depending on the syntactic position, the type of evidentiality denoted by naki changes. I provide contexts below to make the evidential distinctions clear.

The two sentences above are not really a minimal pair in that (2) appears to be a declarative while (3) is a polar interrogative.¹ The REPORTATIVE interpretation is available in polar interrogatives too, as shown in the interrogative counterpart of (2) below:

To demonstrate that the two interpretations of the evidential are non-interchangeable and crucially dependent on syntactic position, it is imperative to mention: in the context in (2), the sentences in (2) and (4) would be felicitous, while the sentence in (3) would be infelicitous/unacceptable; on the other hand, in the context in (3), (2) and (4) would be infelicitous/unacceptable.²

The declarative counterpart of the INFERENTIAL interpretation (keeping the context the same as in (3)) however, is mysteriously ungrammatical/infelicitous.³

One of the hallmark properties of naki is that it cannot ever appear in a clause-initial position. Some element needs to linearly precede it.

There appears to be no syntactic or semantic restriction on what kinds of elements can precede naki. The preceding element can be of any syntactic category, as indicated below:

The elements preceding naki could also be any referential/definite or operator-like elements:

Thus, the data shows that naki does not appear to be in the least selective about what precedes it as long as something does.

In addition, more than one constituent can precede naki. The low verbal complex cannot be broken up by naki, but apart from that, all other elements in the structure can precede naki. Crucially, in all of the cases below, naki has the REPORTATIVE interpretation.

This distribution can be summed up as given in Table 1.

This significant syntactic difference has prompted other studies on naki (Mukherjee 2008; Xu 2017) to assume that there are two lexical entries in the Bangla grammar, in spite of both entries belonging to the same grammatical category, having the exact same phonological form, as well as major semantic and pragmatic similarities. In this paper, I will take up the puzzle of naki’s syntactic distribution, as summed up in Table 1. I will argue that naki is a single element in the Bangla grammar, which is generated in the same base position in both cases and the difference in evidential flavor crucially rests on the syntactic representation of a “judge” argument (cf. Lasersohn 2005; Stephenson 2007) that naki has access to and composes with.

3 The clause-initial position in Bangla

The clause-initial position in Bangla is, in some respects, special. Apart from naki, several other particles are banned from appearing in the clause-initial position. Bayer & Dasgupta (2016) demonstrate this ban for discourse particles such as ki (polar question marker), ba (‘or’), to (‘of course’/emphasis marker) and je (clause-initial complementizer). These can appear in many other positions, but not in the clause-initial position. The authors accord these particles a clitic-like status in the language, given that they mandatorily “attract some focused or at least focusable XP to their left”. A few examples are provided below.

The Bangla polar question particle (henceforth, PolQ) ki in the clause-initial position leads to ungrammaticality. ki shares core distributional properties with naki in that multiple constituents can precede it, and there are no restrictions on what syntactic or semantic properties these constituents could have (the data pertaining to these observations presented above for naki all apply to ki as well). Contrast this affinity of ki for the second position with the Hindi PolQ which is perfectly grammatical in the clause-initial position:

Both Hindi and Bangla are relatively free word order languages. Given that property, the ban on the sentence initial position for ki but not kyaa is surprising. See Bhatt & Dayal (2014; 2017) for a discussion of other properties of Hindi polar kyaa.

Other examples of such clitic-like elements provided below are slightly modified from Bayer & Dasgupta (2016):

Dasgupta (2007) assumes the term “anchors” to refer to clause-internal occurrences of particles such as ki, that are associated with sisters of various categorial types – verbs, arguments and adjuncts. The syntactic assumption made is that although anchors are base-generated as particles associated with different categorial constituents, they covertly move their features to C. In this framework, ki is generated in a sub-CP position, although it is not clear where. Dasgupta (2007) further argues that [-wh] hosts of the enclitic move to a TP-adjoined Topic position.

Abstracting away from the technical details provided in these works, the general idea is that all of these elements banned from the clause-initial position in the language have “enclitic”-like properties⁴ (cf. Faller 2002; Bayer & Dasgupta 2016). I assume that this property is enforced via the presence of an edge feature (Chomsky 2008). This is an EPP feature that requires that some syntactic unit be Merged as the specifier of the category whose feature bears this property. The EPP feature does not specify any properties of the element to be Merged, which is why it would allow any syntactic category, as well as any referential, non-referential, or operator-like elements to satisfy the criteria (for example, see Gísli Jónsson 1991; Holmberg 2000 for accounts of stylistic fronting in Icelandic showing how any category can function as an expletive).

In order to talk about the EPP feature on naki in Minimalist terms, let us first very briefly review some of the essential concepts at play.

4 Coordinates of a finite clause

Cross-linguistically, finite clauses have been argued to have the following characteristics: presence of independently referring overt subjects, opacity with respect to movements out of the clause, case-marking of the clausal subject (see McFadden & Sundaresan 2014 for a discussion). Another important property has also been attributed to finite clauses – independent sentencehood status. Nikolaeva (2007) describes the long standing view that non-finite verbs occur exclusively or predominantly in dependent contexts. The many non-finite forms in Bangla (participles, gerunds, dependent conditionals, subjunctives, infinitives) have many syntactic differences, but none of them can stand alone as an independent utterance in the language, they are always dependent on the matrix tense (Ramchand 2014). Even the subjunctive in Bangla, which behaves like a finite indicative clause as far as syntactic properties are concerned (Dasgupta 1996; Datta 2016), cannot have independent assertive force. Ramchand was the first to suggest that the locus of deficiency in Bangla is not at T but higher up in the clause – namely, in Fin° (following Rizzi 1997).

Bianchi (2003) (as well as Adger 2007; Giorgi 2010) also relates finiteness to temporal anchoring. Simplifying the details, a finite verb has its own temporal encoding in relation to the speech time, while a non-finite verb does not. A non-finite tense is always connected to the temporal anchoring in the main clause (via adjunction or complementation). Bianchi assumes the following configuration:

The “speech event” S_e is formulated as the center of deixis. Being able to encode its presence is the difference between a [+finite] Fin° and a [–finite] Fin°.

Bianchi draws on the literature on logophoricity to claim that speech events have internal speakers or internal addressees that logophoric pronouns in embedded clauses can take as antecedents. She defines a Logophoric Centre.

Based on this formulation, Bianchi ties the ability of introducing a Logophoric Center crucially to only the [+finite] head in the structure, to which the –finite heads are anaphorically related:

Thus, external Logophoric Centers project independent coordinates of Speaker and (optional) Addressee which always correspond to the actual participants in the matrix speech event, i.e. the matrix subject and matrix object. Thus, what Bianchi calls “coordinates” are actual arguments of the matrix verb. The following example taken from Bianchi schematically represents the idea:

The iLC is coindexed with the matrix verb, as per the formulation in (24b).

I propose that in addition to the two coordinates above, a [+finite] Fin° also crucially encodes two other coordinates, which are (null) coordinates of the finite utterance and not the event. This proposal is based on the crucial connection between clausal independence and assertion that has been argued for in many studies on properties of finiteness (Givón 1990; Anderson 1997; Klein 1998; Cristofaro 2007). These studies have claimed that only a finite clause can be independently asserted and that the major function of non-finiteness is signaling syntactic and semantic embedding.

The two null coordinates of a [+finite] Fin° that I propose to add are the SPEAKER and ADDRESSEE of the finite clause. Let us call these _FINSPEAKER and _FINADDRESSEE. Crucially, they are not the arguments of the matrix verb that Bianchi equates with the internal coordinates above. Thus, my proposal indicates there are four coordinates in total, as defined and represented below.

These are structurally represented in the following configuration:

[+finite] Fin°’s SPEAKER and ADDRESSEE are to be crucially kept separate from the Speech Act shells proposed in Speas & Tenny (2003). Speas and Tenny propose that null DPs corresponding to SPEAKER, ADDRESSEE and SEAT OF KNOWLEDGE are generated in Larsonian shells in the speech act domain in all sentences of every language. These are not tied to events or finiteness in any way, but by virtue of every utterance being a speech act of some kind or the other, they are present in the left periphery. I will adopt this Speas-Tennyian formulation of the highest segment of the left periphery in this paper. Their proposal combined with my hypothesis about coordinates that are crucially tied to finiteness gives us a structure like the following:⁵

In order to avoid notational confusion, let us be extremely clear about each of these coordinates. The notation – _SASPEAKER and _SAADDRESSEE– refers to the Speas-Tennyian speech act coordinates. On the other hand, the notation – _FINSPEAKER and _FINADDRESSEE – refers to the coordinates of the finite clause, as projected by Fin○.

Making these distinctions between speech act participants and finite clause participants helps us to make important crucial distinctions in evidential paradigms. For example, consider the English triplet below – the first is a regular assertion, the second an assertion with a REPORTATIVE evidential and the third with an INFERENTIAL evidential. Let us assume a context where John is telling Mary about a party he attended yesterday for some time for all three constructions. The default configuration is one where the speech act coordinates and the finite clause coordinates have the exact same referents, such as (29) below.

The reason behind equating the source of the report with the _FINSPEAKER coordinate of the finite event is that he/she is the one who told John about it. Crucially, the coordinates of an event being reported with a REPORTATIVE evidential are different from the coordinates of an event being reported with an INFERENTIAL evidential such as presumably below, given the personal nature of inference:

My proposal thus makes finite clauses perspective-sensitive because of the presence of these two extra coordinates. Perspective-sensitivity, as the name suggests, requires that there be an anchor in the structure that perspective-sensitive elements can take as antecedents, thus making some individual’s perspective salient. A syntactic way to think about this perspective-sensitivity resulting from finite clauses introducing _FINSPEAKER and _FINADDRESSEE operator-like elements is with respect to binding and agreement. Finite clauses with these operators should then be able to enable the following two scenarios:

I now proceed to show that both of these predictions are borne out. To illustrate (32a), I draw on the indexical shift and complementizer agreement literature, and to illustrate (32b), I discuss the presence of indexical shift across multiple embedded clauses cross-linguistically.

5 Motivating some crucial assumptions

The behavior of naki can be summed up as follows:

The crucial question here is – how does the syntactic position of the same particle effect a change in interpretation? I argue that naki is generated in the same position in both cases and does not move. The apparent differences in syntactic positions and consequent differences in interpretation come about due to the movement of other constituents around naki and other independent syntactic principles, such as the binding relations between operators in the Speech Act domain and inside finite clauses.

The proposal is that naki is a head that takes a finite clause as a complement, and appears to the left of its complement as shown below:

In arguing for this structure, I appeal to the case made in Bayer (1999) with regards to the “hybrid” nature, i.e. mixed-headedness, of Bangla. Bayer argued that while languages display strong tendencies of being either head-final or head-initial, there are often exceptional projections that differ in their headedness. Numerous other works, Van Riemsdijk (1990); Kayne (1994); Samiian (1994) to name a few, argue for mixed-headedness in languages like Dutch, Hungarian, Persian, English, among others, demonstrating that mixed-headedness is arguably a far more common phenomenon than may be apparent from some typological studies.

In their configuration of the high left periphery (see Haegeman & Hill 2013; Hill 2013; Krifka 2013; Woods 2014; Wiltschko 2016 for influential alternate conceptions of the speech-act domain), Speas & Tenny (2003) argue for the presence of a sentient individual in the syntactic spine, an individual whose point of view is reflected in the sentence. They term this sentient argument the “Seat-of-Knowledge”, the argument that can evaluate the proposition it takes scope over. Together with the Speaker and Hearer of the speech act, the Seat of Knowledge (SOK) makes up the Sentience Domain, crucially mapping to participants in the discourse.

Speas and Tenny argue, following Stirling (1993), that different logophoric roles (Source, Self and Pivot; see Sells 1987) arise due to the various ways in which the SOK argument can be coindexed with other arguments in the structure. The authors assume that the default is SPEAKER_i = SOK_i. In a question, the ADDRESSEE is coindexed with the SOK_i (see Miyagawa 2012 for an influential analysis of allocutive agreement and politeness marking in Japanese and Basque, where the ADDRESSEE node is controlled by a probe in a higher position inside the saP). This system crucially treats coindexing to be a sort of control, which requires that the controller c-command the controlee. Apart from the default configuration, another productive pattern attested by Speas and Tenny is where the SOK has a disjoint reference from the other arguments in the Speech Act domain, thus conveying the point of view of someone other than the discourse participants. This notion of disjoint reference will be important in the analysis of naki below.

With respect to the ADDRESSEE node, an anonymous reviewer brings up two Bangla particles – go and re (Dasgupta 1980). These particles do not have any evidential undertones and thus are not directly relevant to the central theses of this paper. However, these two particles are addressee-oriented in a sense, and thus to some extent merit a brief commentary on their place in the system proposed here. These particles essentially serve to provide emphasis or a kind of intensification. Consider the examples below:

Both these particles most productively appear sentence-finally (Dasgupta 1987).⁷ An important difference between the two particles lies in their sensitivity to the honorificity of the addressee: go can only appear when the addressee is given a intermediate honorific status, while re can only appear when the addressee has a non-honorific status. In the structure of the left periphery proffered in this paper (as represented in (28)), I assume that both of these particles would be in a position (possibly the sa* head) that is c-commanded by the high _SAADDRESSEE node (either from its base position or from its moved position, if we assume a Miyagawa-style movement of the _SAADDRESSEE). I leave the investigation of the exact mechanics of such particles for future research.

Inspired by Lewis (1979) and Chierchia et al. (1989), several studies (see Lasersohn 2005; Stephenson 2007) on the semantics of attitude predicates, taste predicates and epistemic modals have proposed the existence of a “judge” parameter which serves as an anchor for perspectival elements in its scope. This sentient “judge” is whose epistemic or doxastic alternatives are quantified over, and the validity of the utterance content is determined against. I propose that the syntactic representation of this judge argument is the Speas-Tennyian SOK in the left periphery. This connection, which might have been informally implied by Speas and Tenny, needs to be made formally explicit:

Thus, given the assumptions about the syntactic structure discussed above, there are three crucial components in the left periphery then that play a role in the naki paradigm:

In the partially schematic representations below, I show that naki’s EPP requirement interacts in interesting ways with the co-indexation requirements of the elements above to yield the attested grammaticality patterns. Specifically, the closest EPP-goal for naki is always FinP. The question arises then – why do we not always get the order “FinP naki” (the clause-final order)? I argue that this is because of the interaction of the configuration laid out above with two other factors: (i) there is a higher probe in the structure (a high Topic°), (ii) the controllable elements in the structure have to be controlled by a controller immediately c-commanding them.

In arguing for the presence of the higher Topic probe, I adopt Simpson & Bhattacharya (2003)’s insight. The authors draw evidence from wh/focus and the focus particle/complementizer je’s syntactic properties to argue that the subject in Bangla wh-questions regularly occurs in a high clausal topic-like position, and the wh-landing site is located under this topic position. For example, they suggest that in the following wh-question, the subject “John” is in a topic position that is higher than where the wh-phrase moves to. This is one of the reasons, the authors argue, that although wh-movement happens in Bangla it appears to be wh-in-situ – actual wh-movement is heavily disguised by the movement of other non-wh arguments and adjuncts to higher positions in the clause.

The authors also draw evidence for this high topic position from the observation that only referentially definite or specific elements occur as subjects preceding wh-phrases in the subject position, i.e. elements that constitute presupposed information as opposed to the new, focused information value of the wh-phrase. For example, in the pair below, the contrast in grammaticality (cf. Bhattacharya 1999) arises when the sequence associated with specificity – [NP [Numeral-Classifier]] – appears before the wh-phrase; contrast this with when the sequence associated with nonspecificity – [[Numeral-Classifier] NP] – appears before the wh-phrase.⁸

This line of reasoning is further supported by the fact that quantified subjects, which the authors argue frequently resist topicalization (49), can only appear to the right of the wh-phrase (50) and not to the left (51).

Based on this body of facts, I take the high Topic position that Simpson & Bhattacharya (2003) propose for Bangla wh-questions to be generally available in the language, including in naki -constructions. Although the authors do not provide an exact syntactic representation of this Topic projection, I propose the following configuration:

Another pertinent assumption that I make in this paper is Fox (1999)’s framework of reconstruction. Fox argues for a copy theory of movement, in which reconstruction is achieved via the (unrecoverable) deletion of the head of the chain and interpretation of the tail alone. This is schematically shown as follows:

Following Fox, I adopt the idea that an element can be deleted only under identity with a copy. This means that in the event that the head of the chain is non-identical to the chain, unrecoverable deletion of the offending copies is blocked, preventing reconstruction from taking place (Fox 1999: 189). This captures the observation that A-bar movement, under the copy theory of movement, can affect Condition C only if the R-expression is inside an adjunct (54a), and only if this adjunct is inserted after movement (54c). Fox illustrates this schematically in the following manner:

Early (before movement) insertion of the adjunct results in the head and tail of the chain being identical, and thus reconstruction proceeds smoothly. This makes certain predictions about the ability of A-bar movement to bleed Condition C. Fox convincingly shows these predictions are not borne out. I refer the reader to the original work for the full details.

Crucially, however, as (54c) shows, if the adjunct is inserted after movement, then reconstruction (i.e. unrecoverable deletion of the adjunct) gets blocked because the head and tail of the chain are not identical anymore, preventing the adjunct from getting interpreted. Thus, Fox argues for late insertion of R-expression containing adjuncts (following Lebeaux 1988). The idea that members of chains can be deleted only under identity with a copy and the fact that reconstruction rests on this identity relation holding between the two ends of a syntactic chain will be important in our analysis of naki.

6 Putting the pieces together

In this section, I show how the crucial assumptions made about several parts of the structure can lead us to an unified syntactic analysis of the Bangla evidential naki. The binding facts can be spelled out as given in Table 2.

The semantics of naki as formulated in Bhadra (2017) argues that naki is a function that takes a judge restriction as one of its arguments. This proposal is fleshed out compositionally, where the SOK node supplies this argument for the naki function. The epistemic or doxastic alternatives of this judge are then quantified over.

An important consideration that is pertinent here is that of the coindexation pattern in questions. As mentioned above, in a question, it is the ADDRESSEE that is coindexed with the SOK_i, given the standard conception of a question in which the addressee is the expected locus of information. How is it then, that the INFERENTIAL interpretation still available in questions such as (3)? This is also crucially linked to the phenomenon of Interrogative Flip which is cross-linguistically robustly attested in many languages (see Garrett 2001; Speas & Tenny 2003; Murray 2010; Lim & Lee 2012, among many others) with evidentials – the locus of the evidential shifts from the speaker in declaratives to the addressee in questions. The key questions can thus be framed in the following manner: does Interrogative Flip occur in Bangla questions with naki? If yes, how is the current analysis of indexation of perspectival heads compatible with that empirical fact?⁹

Interrogative Flip is absent in Bangla questions with evidentials. The questions in (3) and (4) are glossed as ‘Given what I inferred’/’Given what I hear’, in direct contrast with an Interrogative Flip-ing language such as Cheyenne:

An addressee-oriented interpretation such as (55b) is completely absent with Bangla evidentials such as naki and bujhi (Section 6.2.2 below has a more detailed discussion of this particle). Bhadra (2017) provides a semantic-pragmatic analysis for this property that I sum up here. Essentially, Bhadra argues that the locus of difference between languages that Flip and ones that do not (such as Bangla, Telugu; and others such as Shipibo-Konibo, Jarawara, Sochiapam Chinantec, Yukaghir, Macedonian¹⁰, Eastern Pomo, etc (cf. San Roque et al. 2017 for an exhaustive list)) lies in the ability of evidentials in these languages to license a special operator ↑ that has context change potential. The ↑ is a function that takes a proposition and returns a new context in which the tentative commitment set of the speaker (cf. Gunlogson 2008; Farkas & Bruce 2010; Malamud & Stephenson 2015) is updated with that proposition. The tentativeness of the commitment stems from the fact that the speaker still seeks the addressee’s ratification with regards to the validity of the proposition. The ↑ is manifested in these languages as rising intonation. Thus, the crucial claim is that in constructions such as (3) and (4), what sounds like question intonation actually signals the presence of ↑. It is still an information-seeking act in that it asks for confirmation of a claim, and unlike a question in that it does not expressly present two neutral alternatives for the addressee to choose from.

Adopting this analysis from Bhadra (2017), the speaker-oriented glosses of (3) and (4) in contrast to the addressee-oriented (55b) can be explained simply. Languages with the Flip, like Cheyenne, do not license ↑ and thus (55b) is a regular polar question, where the SOK is co-indexed with the addressee. In the Bangla constructions, in contrast, the SOK is not co-indexed with the addressee; the presence of the always ↑ adds the evidential claim to the speaker’s tentative commitment set. Hence, the speaker-oriented evidential interpretations are retained in these constructions. Thus, the current analysis correctly provides the desired indexation patterns and is compatible with the larger vision of a syntax-semantics interface.

Apart from the absence of Interrogative Flip, naki constructions are also striking in their asymmetry with respect to the interaction between evidentiality and speech acts. As shown in example (56), repeated below, the INFERENTIAL interpretation (unlike the REPORTATIVE) is unavailable in a declarative:

The discussion of the semantics of naki constructions in Bhadra (2017) also includes an exploration into this puzzle. Below, I provide a brief summary of the solution proposed in that work, which is compatible with the central syntactic theses proffered in this paper. I refer the reader to the original work for the complete semantic-pragmatic proposal, the full details of which are outside the scope of this paper.

In contrast to ↑ manifested by rising intonation, ↓ is an operator that is present in speech acts with falling intonation (assertions/declaratives). Bhadra (2017) assumes, following Davis (2009), that ↓ updates a speaker’s actual commitment set, and not a tentative one like ↑ does. This essentially translates to direct assertive force on the part of the judge, as conveyed by the construction. The reason that (56) is infelicitous is because of the clash between direct assertive force and indirect inferential evidence signaled by the same judge – the speaker. With the REPORTATIVE interpretation, this clash does not arise because while the direct assertive force is the speaker’s, the source of the grounds for the asserted content is crucially not the speaker. Thus, an in-depth exploration of the semantic-pragmatic contributions of naki along with its syntactic properties helps us arrive at a holistic picture of the particle.

Returning to our main domain of investigation, one major claim that this section proposed is that the _FINSPEAKER needs an immediate controller. The analysis presented below demonstrates how the co-indexation or contra-indexation of the _SASPEAKER and the SOK has important consequences for the anchoring of the _FINSPEAKER, given independent syntactic principles.

7 Conclusion

This paper defended an unified analysis of the Bangla evidential naki which changes its evidential flavor based on its syntactic position relative to other phrases. The particle naki was argued to be generated in one single base position; the apparent surface differences in the syntactic distribution of the two evidential flavors were shown to fall out from independent syntactic principles relating to c-command and control, binding, locality and reconstruction. In particular, this paper attempted to provide an understanding of how the syntactic representation of perspective interacts with evidentiality, by demonstrating that evidentials always take finite clauses as complements. Finite clauses were crucially argued to always be syntactically perspective-sensitive, i.e. the left periphery of finite clauses were shown to contain elements susceptible to control by speech act heads. The evidence for this claim was drawn from the literature on indexical shift and complementizer agreement – realms which have not been connected with evidentiality before. In addition, different patterns of indexation among several speech-act-related operators were demonstrated to be inherently linked with resultant word orders, a result that would otherwise appear surprising. This paper, thus, attempted to present a view of the syntactic foundations on which the (primarily semantic) category of evidentiality rests in human language.

Abbreviations

1 = first person, 2 = second person, 3 = third person, ABS = absolutive, ACC = accusative, CL = classifier, COMP = complementizer, DAT = dative, DEM = demonstrative, DO = direct object, EMPH = emphasis, ERG = ergative, IMPV = imperfective, IO = indirect object, FUT = future tense, NEG = negation, NMLZ = nominalizer, OBJ = object, PL = plural, PERF = perfect, PFV = perfective, PST = past tense, PRESPERF = present perfect, PSTPERF = past perfect, PTCP = participle, SG = singular.

Transcription key:

T D R = Retroflex ʈ ɖ ɽ

S = Palato-alveolar ʃ

N = Velar ŋ

E O = mid vowels æ ɔ

M = Nasalisation

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.