Evidentiality in Phi

A child sees a snake at the well. A friend hears the news, an elder finds a trail, and a parent expects the snake to avoid the gathering. The event is one; the routes to each account are not. Phi can make those routes audible with four particles: hi for direct perception, ke for inference from particular signs, ti for a report, and ho for background assumption. One well, four worn paths. This pamphlet walks them one at a time.

The manual's chapter 16 owns the definitions. This pamphlet supplies room to compare them, place them in the Slot 1 stack, and practise the places where one source shades into another. It also keeps apart several questions that are easily bundled together: a source marker says how a claim arrived, and nothing else about it.

The four particles are a small, complete map of the ways a claim can reach a speaker: through the senses, through reasoning, through another person, or through expectation, and the whole of it is four syllables long. By the end, all four should be easier to hear and to place. The exercises move from the snake at the well into reported speech, negation, questions, short narratives, and an optional journal form. A clause takes no more than one evidential; when two routes matter, Phi gives each its own sentence.

This pamphlet assumes the particle system in manual chapter 9, tense and aspect in chapter 14, and the complement frames in chapter 19. It is a companion to manual Part IV, chapter 16.

The elder ends the primer's story with theula miona shewo haolu, everyone spoke truly. That is the elder's judgement after the account. The four particles did not supply it.