Causality and Evidentiality

Abstract

This paper formalizes the causal component of Davis & Hara’s (2014) analysis of Japanese evidentiality, which defines “indirect evidence” as an observation of the effect state of the cause-effect dependency. The analysis correctly predicts that uttering p-youda only commits the speaker to ‘if p, q must be true’ but not to the prejacent p, and successfully derives the asymmetry between the prejacent p and the evidence source q.