Evidentiality in Athabaskan

Abstract

This paper is a typological survey of grammatical evidentials across the Athabaskan language family. It is shown that expressions of evidentiality differ widely from language to language. There are languages in which evidentiality is poorly grammaticalized (such as Chiricahua) to very full evidential systems (in Hupa and San Carlos Apache). Explanations for this difference must be sought in the area of contact features and general typological development, rather than trying to look for genetic explanations for the difference in evidential systems between languages. This is exemplified with two cases, (a) the morpheme /la/ ’inferential’, which may be traced back to a verb ’to be’, a well-known grammaticalization source; (b) the origin of visual evidentials, which derive from deictic sources.