Good evening, afternoon, or morning to you, people of r/conlangs. Today's Saturday, and that means it's time for another typological paper! Once again, there will be some prompts for you to discuss in the comments.
Evidentiality in Boran and Witotoan languages (Wojtylak)
This week's paper is on evidentiality in two South American language families, namely, the Boran and Witotoan languages. Evidentiality encodes how a speaker obtains information: you can have markers for when an event has been observed, for assumptions based on evidence, for non-visual sensory input, and much more. Now onto today's prompts:
- Does your language have evidential markers?
- If so, which categories are distinguished? (E.g. visual/non-visual/inferred, sensory/non-sensory etc.)
- How do these morphemes work on a semantic levels? How do they interact with each other or with other morphological features?
- Are there any exceptions regarding the expected behaviour of these markers in your language?
- If your language does not feature evidentiality as a grammatical category, how are contexts like 'I saw him shoot the man' and other meanings that are commonly encoded by evidentiality expressed?
Remember to try to comment on other people's languages
Submit your papers here!
So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next Saturday, and happy conlanging!