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Re: Evidentiality drift (WAS: Pronouns & sexuality)

From:Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...>
Date:Friday, February 27, 2009, 9:32
Sai Emrys skrev:
> On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 6:46 PM, Herman Miller <hmiller@...> wrote: >> Back to the framing idea though: if you've got >> a language like Tirelat, where you can't >> express tense without evidentiality, it's >> pretty much clear from the language what each >> side would consider to be reliable facts as >> opposed to opinion or hearsay. If you have a >> conflict of opinions, no big deal, but if facts >> are in dispute, you won't be considered >> credible unless you can back them up. >> Ultimately, I'm not sure that would be of much >> help though, because the meanings of the words >> would still differ. > > I wonder: would such use of evidentials survive > over time? > > Surely politics (and the more subtle > interpersonal sorts) would erase these > distinctions; simply put, it's useful to > misrepresent your evidence, or to state your > opinions as facts. So evidentials would drift to > become a matter of simple emphasis or stress. > (in the same way that people now use "x is > literally y" to mean "x is figuratively but > emphatically y"). > > Do any of you know of how a natlang with > evidentials has handled this IRL?
The rub is that evidentials anyway always assert not the absolute truth-value of a statement but the speaker's *opinion or belief* about the truth- value of the statement, so that "I think that x is truth/opnion/hearsay" is always subsumed. The use of an opinion/belief evidential is only emphatic in the first place. Incoherently, /BP