Speaker discourse roles and the discourse profile of reportative evidentials

Abstract

Reportative evidentials introduce an asymmetry between what their utterance makes at issue and what their utterance commits the speaker to. We propose that this is due to reportative evidentials enforcing a contextual requirement of nonidentity between the speaker and the agent whose commitment is being described. A general mechanism for as sertive update that is sensitive to this distinction delivers the exceptionality of reportative updates while preserving a uniform characterization of assertion. We then discuss ramifi cations for the typology of evidentials, and sketch an extension to the use of reportative evidentials in questions.