Chapter 16 Evidentiality, or knowing how we know
Why evidentiality matters for peace
Disagreement often concerns two questions at once: what happened, and how each person reached that account. Evidentials cannot reconcile the speakers. They can keep the second question from disappearing inside the first.
Four source claims
| Particle | Gloss | Claim |
|---|---|---|
hi | DIR | I perceived the event or state directly. |
ke | INFER | I concluded this from specific evidence. |
ti | REP | I received this information from another source. |
ho | ASSUM | I rely on background expectation. |
Each marker gives a listener a more exact place to respond. A false hi remains false, an inference may be weak, a report may have lost its source, and an assumption can be asserted with great confidence. Provenance makes none of them harmless or correct.
A disagreement with evidence
shia to hi wepu.
3SG PST DIR go.
shia to ke ma wepu.
3SG PST INFER NEG go.
thia hina thesori phelu.
2SG what evidence hold.
mia shia wiru to hi nila.
1SG 3SG basket PST DIR see.
The basket does not settle the departure. It gives the disagreement somewhere to go: perhaps the person left without it, perhaps the witness mistook someone else, perhaps the time of the sight matters. The speakers can now examine the claimed witness and evidence instead of repeating two conclusions louder.
Accountability without a badge
An unmarked assertion is not an evasion. It makes no source claim. When provenance affects testimony, care, a shared decision, or another person's ability to answer, an evidential can put the speaker's claimed relation to the statement on the record.
That relation is itself accountable. hi can be challenged by asking what was perceived; ke by examining the evidence and inference; ti by tracing the report; ho by testing the expectation. One source per clause keeps those claims distinct.
Regular use can become a practice of noticing how a claim arrived. No speech evidence yet shows that this practice changes thought or behaviour over time. The more modest value is already substantial: witness, inference, report, and assumption are short enough to say before disagreement hardens around an unnamed source.
When provenance matters, it receives a particle; when it does not, it stays unmarked. In either case, the next person remains free to ask how you know.
That closes the particle system, and with it the grammar of the single clause. Chapter 9 called the inventory finite; you have now met all thirty-five, each in its slot. What remains is what clauses do in company. Part V joins them, frames them, and sets them inside one another, and every sentence it teaches stands on the clause you can now build.