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Evidential meaning and (not-)at-issueness

Paper · 2020 · Natasha Korotkova

Summary

The paper asks whether the evidence-type signal carried by grammatical evidentials, which Korotkova calls the Evidential Requirement (ER), really is conventionally encoded Not-At-Issue (NAI) content. That is the near-standard position in formal semantics. Using new Georgian fieldwork data, Dutch data and examples from the literature, she examines the three diagnostics usually cited together in support of this view:

  • the ER escaping clause-mate negation,
  • the ER resisting direct denial,
  • the ER failing to answer direct questions.

She compares two ER-as-NAI frameworks: Murray's assertion-based model and Faller's (2019) QUD-based model. Her conclusions:

  • Wide scope over negation is more plausibly a matter of scope.
  • Non-challengeability reflects limits on propositional anaphora rather than at-issueness.
  • Answerhood is the most trustworthy test, but its results follow naturally only from the QUD approach.

Dutch examples where a focused evidential becomes at-issue suggest that the ER is often backgrounded for pragmatic reasons, not by convention. This matters because it could move work out of the semantics of evidentials and into pragmatics. It also points to empirical gaps that need filling.

Key points

  • ER-as-NAI view. It treats evidentials like appositives and slifting parentheticals. Two main representatives:
    • Murray 2010/2014/2017, based on Cheyenne. The ER is a direct, non-negotiable update, and no discourse referent is created for it.
    • Faller 2019, based on Cuzco Quechua. The ER is conventionally marked as irrelevant to the QUD.
  • Three diagnostics. (A) negation, (B) non-challengeability, (C) answerhood. A and B hold for nearly all grammatical evidentials, while C has been tested far less.
  • Diagnostics need not agree. At-issueness is not a uniform notion (Koev 2018). Anaphoric potential is conceptually separate from at-issueness except under a salience-based definition (Snider 2017).
  • Focus can flip the status. In Dutch, placing focus on the evidential can make the ER at-issue, which appositives do not allow. Focusing may be impossible in some languages, for example Cuzco Quechua, Turkish and German wohl.
  • Pragmatic hypothesis. Evidentials justify claims, and justification-type discourse relations do not advance the discourse. This would explain why evidentials are backgrounded by default, much like parenthetical attitude reports (e.g., "Miriam thinks…").

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Do not treat bundled diagnostics as one test: each probe (negation scope, denial, answerhood) can reflect a different underlying mechanism, so each must be validated on its own.
  • I2. Information-source meaning can be stored as a separate, automatically accepted update, kept apart from the negotiable main proposition.
  • I3. At-issueness can be defined relative to the current question, so the same content may be backgrounded or main depending on what is asked.
  • I4. Answerhood is singled out as the most reliable probe: check whether a piece of content can serve as an answer to a direct question.
  • I5. Being anaphorically accessible to responses like "That's not true" is distinct from being the main point, so denial targeting should be modeled on its own.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): Evaluation suites for pragmatic labels could report each probe separately and include negative controls where the probes are expected to disagree.
  • I2 (world): Each fact in the text world could carry a source tag (seen, inferred, reported) that does not become the asserted content itself.
  • I3 (frames): The prag crate could mark which frame answers the active QUD, letting "X thinks P" contribute either P or X's belief depending on the question.
  • I4 (answer): QA on fables could test whether readers pick the main proposition, not the evidential or reporting layer, when answering "what happened" questions.
  • I5 (frames): Coreference for propositional anaphors ("that", "it") could resolve to the scope proposition by default while keeping this choice separate from the at-issue labeling.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓University of KonstanzKonstanz · Germany9 works · 163 citations

📚 Shelves 5The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 9,086 worksArtificial Intelligence · 8,889 worksArts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksPhilosophy · 211 works

Cite

Cite as Natasha Korotkova. 2020. Evidential meaning and (not-)at-issueness. Semantics and Pragmatics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3765/sp.13.4

@article{korotkova2020evidential,
  title = {{Evidential meaning and (not-)at-issueness}},
  author = {Natasha Korotkova},
  journal = {Semantics and Pragmatics},
  year = {2020},
  doi = {10.3765/sp.13.4},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.13.4}
}

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