Evidentiality

In a number of languages, scattered across the world, every statement must contain a specification of the type of evidence on which it is based--whether the speaker saw it, or heard it, or inferred it from indirect evidence, or learnt it from somebody else. Of interest to any grammarian, the book discusses evidentiality, and the cognitive and sociolinguistic consequences of evidentiality in a language.

Alexandra Aikhenvald is Professor of Linguistics, The Cairns Institute, James Cook University. She has worked on descriptive and historical aspects of Berber languages and in 1990 published, in Russian, a grammar of Modern Hebrew. She is a major authority on languages of the Arawak family o fnorthern Amazonia, and has written grammars of Bare (1995, based on work with the last speaker who has since died), Warekena (1998), and Tariana, from Northwest Amazonia (2003). Her books include Classifiers: a Typology of Noun Categorization Devices (2000, paperback reissue 2003), and Language Contact in Amazonia (2002). She is currently working on a grammatical description of Manambu, from the Sepik region of New Guinea.