| Evidential markers fundamentally code the way in which speakers acquire knowledge of the information they talk about. Although evidential markers emerge from a full range of lexical and grammatical categories, the focus of evidential study in linguistics has been on its formal and semantic properties in grammaticalized systems. Our understanding of the conceptual and pragmatic factors that motivate the use of evidential forms, grammaticalized or not grammaticalized, is still in its relative infancy.; This study investigates the utilization of evidential forms in narrative discourse and its implications for the conceptual and pragmatic foundations of evidentiality, through a comparative analysis of evidential use in narrative retellings. The languages of investigation--Macedonian, English and Japanese--represent a range of evidential coding types with respect to their grammaticalization. It was predicted that regardless of the formal properties of the evidential system, speakers retelling someone else's personal experience story would consistently code narrative information as originating with that experiencer.; Dramatic variations across the three languages in the deployment of evidential coding in these retellings demonstrate that evidentiality is not simply a mapping of actual source of information onto some evidential category, grammaticalized or otherwise. Instead it is argued that evidential coding is the linguistic expression of epistemological stance, the conceptualization of information with respect to some source. As a conceptual structure, epistemological stance need not reflect the actual source of information but rather is part of the conceptualization of the speaker's subjective self. The variations in evidential coding found between the languages of investigation reflect the effects of different pragmatic phenomena, interactive and cultural, on the adoption of an epistemological stance. |
