Cover not available

Article published In: Evidentiality, Modality and Grammaticalization
Edited by Eric Mélac
[Studies in Language 48:3] 2024
► pp. 513–542

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload EPUB
authorization required
Position paper

The links between evidentiality, modality, and grammaticalization

ORCiD logo with link | Université Paul Valéry – Montpellier 3
Published online: 8 April 2024
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.24011.mel
Abstract
This paper introduces the main notions that are addressed in this special issue, namely evidentiality, modality, and grammaticalization. It defines each notion and briefly synthesizes the literature. It also presents some of the controversies which surround the ideas that prevail in these research fields. Crosslinguistic examples illustrate the main evidential and modal categories, and clarify why the two domains are both distinct and related. The paper then sketches the main pathways of grammaticalization of modal and evidential markers as they have been documented in typological work. Finally, it introduces the contributions to this special issue, highlights the new insights, and discusses what remains to be investigated on the links between evidentiality, modality, and grammaticalization.
Article outline
  • 1.Setting the scene
  • 2.Defining evidentiality and modality
    • 2.1How to define evidentiality?
    • 2.2How to define modality?
    • 2.3How are evidentiality and modality linked?
  • 3.The grammaticalization of evidentiality and modality
    • 3.1What is grammaticalization?
    • 3.2What do we know of the grammaticalization of modals and evidentials?
  • 4.The contributions of this volume: New insights
  • 5.Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
References (79)
References
Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. (ed.). 2018b. The Oxford handbook of evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2004. Evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2011. The grammaticalization of evidentiality. In Bernd Heine & Heiko Narrog (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, 605–613. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2018a. Evidentiality: The framework. In Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald (ed.), The Oxford handbook of evidentiality, 1–43. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2018c. Evidentiality and language contact. In Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald (ed.), The Oxford handbook of evidentiality, 148–172. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2021. The web of knowledge: Evidentiality at the cross-roads. Leiden: Brill. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2024. Speaking about knowledge: Evidentiality and the ecology of language. In Mélac, Eric (ed.), The links between evidentiality, modality, and grammaticalization. [Special Issue]. Studies in Language.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
AnderBois, Scott. 2014. On the exceptional status of reportative evidentials. Proceedings of SALT 241. 234–254. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Anderson, Lloyd B. 1986. Evidentials, paths of change, and mental maps: Typologically regular asymmetries. In Wallace Chafe & Johanna Nichols (eds.), Evidentiality: The Linguistic Coding of Epistemology, 273–312. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bergqvist, Henrik. 2018. Evidentiality as stance. In Ad Foolen, Gijs Mulder & Helen de Hoop (eds.), Evidence for evidentiality, 19–43. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas & Edward Finegan. 1989. Styles of stance in English: Lexical and grammatical marking of evidentiality and affect. Text-interdisciplinary journal for the study of discourse 9(1), 93–124. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bisang, Walter, Andrej Malchukov, Iris Rieder, Linlin Sun, Marvin Martiny & Svenja Luell. 2020. Position paper: Universal and areal patterns in grammaticalization. In Walter Bisang & Andrej Malchukov (eds.), Grammaticalization Scenarios from Europe and Asia (Vol. 11), 1–88. Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Boye, Kasper & Peter Harder. 2009. Evidentiality: Linguistic categories and grammaticalization. Functions of language 16(1), 9–43. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2012. A usage-based theory of grammatical status and grammaticalization. Language 88(1), 1–44. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Boye, Kasper. 2016. The Expression of Epistemic Modality. In Jan Nuyts & Johan van der Auwera (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Modality and Mood, 117–140. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2010. Evidence for what? Evidentiality and scope. STUF-Language typology and universals 63(4), 290–307. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2018. Evidentiality: The notion and the term. In Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald (ed.), The Oxford handbook of evidentiality, 261–272. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2023. Grammaticalization as conventionalization of discursively secondary status: Deconstructing the lexical-grammatical continuum. Transactions of the Philological Society 121(2), 270–292. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Brinton, Laurel J. 2017. The evolution of pragmatic markers in English: Pathways of change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan & Suzanne Fleischman. 1995. Modality in Grammar and Discourse: An Introductory Essay. In Joan L. Bybee & Suzanne Fleischman (eds.), Modality in Grammar and Discourse, 1–14. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan, Revere Perkins & William Pagliuca. 1994. The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Charney, Jean O. 1993. A grammar of Comanche. Lincoln & London: The University of Nebraska Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cornillie, Bert. 2007. The continuum between lexical and grammatical evidentiality: A functional analysis of Spanish parecer. Italian Journal of Linguistics 19(1), 109–128.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Corpus gesproken Nederlands. 2004. Version 2.0. Leiden: TST-Centrale INL.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Croft, William. 2005. Word classes, parts of speech, and syntactic argumentation. Linguistic Typology 9(3), 431–441.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Davies, Mark. (2008–). The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Available online at [URL]
. (2004). British National Corpus (from Oxford University Press). Available online at [URL]
De Haan, Ferdinand. 2001. The relation between modality and evidentiality. Linguistische Berichte 91, 201–216.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Drolma, Dawa & Hiroyuki Suzuki. 2024. The paradigmaticity of evidentials in the Tibetic languages of Khams. In Mélac, Eric (ed.), The links between evidentiality, modality, and grammaticalization. [Special Issue]. Studies in Language.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Foolen, Ad, Gijs Mulder & Helen de Hoop (eds.). 2018. Evidence for evidentiality. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Friedman, Victor A. 2003. Evidentiality in the Balkans with special attention to Macedonian and Albanian. In Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald & Robert M. W. Dixon (eds.), Studies in evidentiality, 189–218. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2018. Where Do Evidentials Come From? In Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Evidentiality, 124–147. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gildea, Spike & Jóhanna Barðdal. 2022. From grammaticalization to Diachronic Construction Grammar: A natural evolution of the paradigm. Studies in Language. Online First Article.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Guentchéva, Zlatka (ed.). 2018. Epistemic modalities and evidentiality in cross-linguistic perspective. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Haspelmath, Martin. 2012. How to compare major word-classes across the world’s languages. In Thomas Graf, Denis Paperno, Anna Szabolcsi & Jos Tellings (eds.), Theories of everything: In honor of Edward Keenan, 109–130. Los Angeles: UCLA.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Heine, Bernd & Tania Kuteva. 2002. World lexicon of grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2005. Language contact and grammatical change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hengeveld, Kees. 2013. Parts-of-speech systems as a basic typological determinant. In Jan Rijkhoff & Eva van Lier (eds.), Flexible Word Classes: Typological studies of underspecified parts of speech, 31–55. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Huddleston, Rodney & Geoffrey K. Pullum (eds.). 2002. The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kuryłowicz, Jerzy. 1975 [1965]. The evolution of grammatical categories. Esquisses linguistiques 21, 38–54.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kuteva, Tania, Bernd Heine, Bo Hong, Haiping Long, Heiko Narrog & Seongha Rhee (eds.). 2019. World lexicon of grammaticalization. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lazard, Gilbert. 2001. On the grammaticalization of evidentiality. Journal of pragmatics 33(3), 359–367. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lehmann, Christian. 1995 [1982]. Thoughts on grammaticalization. Munich: Lincom Europa.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mélac, Eric & Joanna Bialek. 2024. Evidentiality as a grammaticalization passenger: An investigation of evidential developments in Tibetic languages and beyond. In Mélac, Eric (ed.), The links between evidentiality, modality, and grammaticalization. [Special Issue]. Studies in Language. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mélac, Eric, Nicolas Tournadre & Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald. Forthcoming. Talking about oneself in multi-term evidential systems: From the Himalayas to Amazonia
Mélac, Eric. 2014. L’évidentialité en anglais: Approche contrastive à partir d’un corpus anglais-tibétain. PhD dissertation, Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3.
. 2022. The grammaticalization of evidentiality in English. English Language & Linguistics 26(2), 331–359. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2023. The pragmatic differences between grammatical and lexical evidentiality: A corpus-based study of Tibetan and English. Journal of Pragmatics 2101, 143–156. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mortelmans, Tanja. 2024. Frequency differences in reportative exceptionality and how to account for them: A case study on verbal reportative markers in French, Dutch and German. In Mélac, Eric (ed.), The links between evidentiality, modality, and grammaticalization. [Special Issue]. Studies in Language. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2016. The Expression of Non-Epistemic Modal Categories. In Jan Nuyts & Johan van der Auwera (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Modality and Mood, 89–116. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Newmeyer, Frederick J. 2000. Deconstructing grammaticalization. Language sciences 23(2–3), 187–229. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Norde, Muriel. 2009. Degrammaticalization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2001b. Subjectivity as an evidential dimension in epistemic modal expressions. Journal of pragmatics 33(3), 383–400. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2014. Subjectivity in modality, and beyond. In Andrzej Zuczkowski, Ramona Bongelli, Ilaria Riccioni & Carla Canestrari (eds.), Communicating certainty and uncertainty in medical, supportive and scientific contexts, 13–30. Amsterdam: John Benjamin. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2016. Analyses of the modal meanings. In Jan Nuyts & Johan Van Der Auwera (eds.) The Oxford handbook of modality and mood. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2017. Evidentiality reconsidered. In Juana I. Marín-Arrese, Gerda Hassler & Marta Carretero (eds.), Evidentiality Revisited: Cognitive Grammar, Functional and Discourse-Pragmatic Perspectives, 57–83. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2024. On the link between grammaticalization and subjectification: The case of the Dutch modals. In Mélac, Eric (ed.), The links between evidentiality, modality, and grammaticalization. [Special Issue]. Studies in Language.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Palmer, Frank Robert. Mood and modality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Simaki, Vasiliki, Carita Paradis, Maria Skeppstedt, Magnus Sahlgren, Kostiantyn Kucher & Andreas Kerren. 2020. Annotating speaker stance in discourse: The Brexit Blog Corpus. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 16(2), 215–248.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Squartini, Mario. 2007. Evidentiality between lexicon and grammar. Italian Journal of Linguistics 19(1), 1–39.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2016. Interactions between Modality and Other Semantic Categories. In Jan Nuyts & Johan van der Auwera (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Modality and Mood, 50–67. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2018. Extragrammatical Expression of Information Source. In Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Evidentiality, 273–185. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tabor, Whitney & Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 1998. Structural scope expansion and grammaticalization. In Anna Giacalone Ramat & Paul J. Hopper (eds.), The Limits of Grammaticalization, 229–72. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tournadre, Nicolas & Randy J. LaPolla. 2014. Towards a new approach to evidentiality: Issues and directions for research. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman area 37(2), 240–263. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tournadre, Nicolas. 2017. A typological sketch of evidential/epistemic categories in the Tibetic languages. In Lauren Gawne & Nathan W. Hill (eds.). Evidential systems of Tibetan languages, 95–129. Berlin & Boston: Walter de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs & Graeme Trousdale. 2013. Constructionalization and Constructional Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1995. Subjectification in grammaticalization. In Dieter Stein & Susan Wright (eds.), Subjectivity and subjectivisation: Linguistic perspectives, 31–54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2010. Revisiting subjectification and intersubjectification. In Kristin Davidse, Lieven Vandelanotte & Hubert Cuyckens (eds.), Subjectification, Intersubjectification and Grammaticalization, 29–70. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
van der Auwera, Johan & Vladimir A. Plungian. 1998. Modality’s semantic map. Linguistic Typology 2(1), 79–124. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
van der Auwera, Johan. 1996. Modality: The Three-Layered Scalar Square. Journal of Semantics 13(3), 181–195. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vokurková, Zuzana. 2008. Epistemic modalities in spoken Standard Tibetan. PhD dissertation, Filozofick. Fakulta Univerzity Karlovy – Université Paris 8.
Wiemer, Björn & Juana I. Marín-Arrese (eds.). 2022. Evidential marking in European languages: Toward a unitary comparative account. Berlin & Boston: Walter de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wiemer, Björn. 2018. Evidentials and epistemic Modality. In Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Evidentiality, 124–147. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ziegeler, Debra. 2011. The grammaticalization of modality. In Bernd Heine & Heiko Narrog (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, 595–604. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2016. The Diachrony of Modality and Mood. In Jan Nuyts & Johan van der Auwera (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Modality and Mood, 387–405. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (5)

Cited by five other publications

Cheshire, Jenny, David Hall & Zoë Adams
2025. Direct evidentiality in the grammar of English: must have in a London dialect. English Language and Linguistics ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Greco, Paolo
2025.  Quousque veritatem suam non inveniat: fonte della conoscenza, accertamento della verità giudiziaria e semantica verbale tra evidenzialità e modalità epistemica nelle leggi dei Longobardi. Romanistisches Jahrbuch 76:1 ► pp. 31 ff. DOI logo
Lewis, Diana
2025. Between core and periphery: the development in English of a modal adverb, an evaluative adverb and a discourse connector. Folia Linguistica 59:2 ► pp. 275 ff. DOI logo
Mélac, Eric
2025. Emerging inferentials in English?. Functions of Language 32:1 ► pp. 105 ff. DOI logo
Mélac, Eric & Jacques Bres
2025. Is French an “evidential language”? A reassessment of the evidential uses of French tenses. Journal of French Language Studies 35 DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 2 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue