Narrowly defined, the concept of evidentiality involves the linguistic resources that speakers and writers use to mark where the information that they are reporting on comes from. Traditionally, research into the linguistic marking of source has concentrated on languages that employ a specific set of morphological marking. However, recent studies have shown that, although it does not signal evidentiality through morphology and although marking is not obligatory, English has nevertheless a complex system of indicating the source of information (Whitt 2010; Bednarek 2006; Chafe 1986). While the strategies used in Present-Day English have now received some attention, historical patterns remain an uncharted area (see, however, Brinton 1996; Palander-Collin 1999).
The aim of this paper is to explore the use of evidentiality marking or evidentials in the Early Modern English witness depositions included in An Electronic Text Edition of Depositions 1560–1760 or ETED (Kytö, Grund, and Walker 2011). To enable comparisons with a previous study on evidentials in depositions from the Salem witch trials (Grund forthcoming), I will focus on ETED material from the second half of the seventeenth century. The ETED material is particularly suitable for a study of this kind since the witnesses frequently indicate the source of information, presumably to show where their evidence comes from and that it is credible. I will demonstrate what devices were at the witnesses’ disposal (focusing on categories of construction such as verb phrases, prepositional phrases, etc.), and how they utilized them in different contexts to fulfill a variety of pragmatic functions, such as indicating reliability/possibility/probability and signaling emphasis. I will draw on the classification framework suggested by Aikhenvald (2004), thus considering categories such as Sensory Evidence (e.g. see, hear, feel), Inference (e.g. must, seem), Assumption (e.g. believe, think, suppose), and Quotatives (e.g. they/people say, I have been told). I will also take into consideration contexts in which no marking of source occurs.
In addition to providing insights into historical patterns of evidentials, this paper will also contribute to our understanding of how extralinguistic factors such as type of court case, the larger context of the legal process, and the communicative purposes of the witnesses and scribes significantly shaped their linguistic choices.
Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2004. Evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bednarek, Monika. 2006. “Epistemological Positioning and Evidentiality in English News Discourse: A Text-Driven Approach.” Text and Talk 26: 635–60.
Brinton, Laurel. 1996. Pragmatic Markers in English: Grammaticalization and Discourse Functions. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Chafe, Wallace. 1986. “Evidentiality in English Conversation and Academic Writing.” In Evidentiality: The Linguistic Coding of Epistemology, ed. Wallace Chafe and Johanna Nichols. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. 261–72.
Grund, Peter. Forthcoming. “The Nature of Knowledge: Evidence and Evidentiality in the Witness Depositions from the Salem Witch Trials.” American Speech.
Kytö, Merja, Peter J. Grund, and Terry Walker. 2011. Testifying to Language and Life in Early Modern England. Including a CD containing An Electronic Text Edition of Depositions 1560–1760 (ETED). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Palander-Collin, Minna. 1999. Grammaticalization and Social Embedding: I THINK and METHINKS in Middle and Early Modern English. Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki 55.Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.
Whitt, Richard J. 2010. Evidentiality and Perception Verbs in English and German. German Linguistics and Cultural Studies 26. Oxford: Peter Lang.