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Evidentiality In The Uto-Aztecan Languages, Tim Thornes

English Literature Faculty Publications and Presentations

Evidentiality, the grammatical expression of the information source for a proposition, is quite diverse among the languages of the Uto-Aztecan family. This diversity is manifest both in the number of terms and associated functional distinctions and in the formal means used to express evidential functions. The purpose of this chapter is to synthesize and describe properties of evidential expression across the family both as a contribution to a typology of evidential systems in the world's languages and to an understanding of how such systems develop in the context of a well-established, but underrepresented and lesser-known, language family.