Re: Evidentiality drift (WAS: Pronouns & sexuality)

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