CHAPTER 1 EVIDENTIALITY: HISTORIC, AREAL, AND GENETIC CONSIDERATIONS The most common definition of evidentiality states that it is the grammatical expression of
information source. Although this is a suitable working definition, it is important, at the outset,
to distinguish evidential meaning from the evidential category. Evidential meaning is expressed
by any morpheme, word, or phrase that states the existence of some source of information. An
evidential category, however, would be a unique verbal category, distinct from others, comprised
of grammatical forms whose main purpose is the expression of information source. Much of
what has been written about evidentiality concerns the relationship between evidential meaning
and the status of evidentiality as either an independent category or a range of meanings
associated with some other category.
The purpose of this chapter is to examine the history of evidentiality studies and to situate
the Turkic languages within this history, as they are probably responsible for the spread of the
so-called evidentiality throughout Eurasia. The first section is devoted to the history of
evidentiality studies, from Al-Kāšğarī’s 11
th
-century account of
PAST
and
PERFECT
in Turkic
dialects (1982), to Jakobson’s (1957/1971) formulation of evidentiality as a verbal category, to
modern accounts of this phenomenon. A subsection is devoted to the notion of verbal categories
and discusses the complex relationship between evidential meaning and verbal categories,
particularly in regard to how two concepts are related in Eurasian languages. The second section
discusses their role of Uzbek and Kazakh as languages at the heart of the Eurasian evidentiality
belt and as members of the Turkic language family.
