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Swift, Comedy, Evidentiality: Words Without Speakers, Gene Washington

Gene Washington

Evidentiality is a school of linguistics that describes how language encodes evidence: the categories are time, place, manner and person. Swift uses these categories to create unreliable narrators. In other words, they violate the basic categories of evidentiality. For example, using hearsay instead of the more reliable direct seeing. The case study here is to his Tale of a Tub.