On the grammaticalization of evidentiality

This paper discusses the conditions for the grammaticalization of evidentia lity in different languages, with special attention to the languages of Sou th Eastern Europe and the Middle East. In these languages, evidentially mar ked discourse is opposed to neutral discourse, while in some other language s, evidential markers are necessarily included in every verb form; and in o thers, evidentiality is only lexically expressed. The last section deals wi th the problem of cross-language comparisons of evidential systems. A few t houghts are presented on the ques tion of how to build a set of concepts to be used as a tertium comparationis. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rig hts reserved.