The landscape of inferential evidentiality: Towards a unified framework

Abstract

Inferential evidential markers (IEMs) in assertions indicate that the speaker inferred φ from a set of privileged knowledge (e.g. from facts that the speaker witnessed directly). As the intuition that ‘inferencing took place’ is typical for IEMs, a uniform analysis in terms of inferencing seems warranted. The attested logical properties of IEMs, however, can differ substantially from language to language, which led to a multitude of incommensurable accounts. I propose a unified underlying framework which (a) captures the implicitly assumed inferencing in IEMs and (b) can be modulated so as to capture IEMs of different logical strength in a common framework. The model builds on von Fintel + Gillies’ (2010, 2021) kernel model and can be adapted to account for German wohl, Gitksan =ima and Cuzco Quechua =chá