Evidentials are grammatical elements such as affixes and particles indicating
the source of knowledge. We provide an overview of this grammatical category
and consider three research domains to which developmental studies on evidentiality
contribute: the acquisition of linguistic means to characterize knowledge,
the conceptual understanding of knowledge sources, and the evaluation of
others’ testimony. We also consider the study of evidentiality in relation to the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis about the influence of language on thought |