Seminar | Evidentiality in Areal Perspective: Views from the Balkans, the Caucasus and Beyond
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Victor A. Friedman (Professor Emeritus, Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Linguistics and Humanities Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago and Research Professor at La Trobe University).
Abstract
The Balkans constitute the first geographic region to be recognised as a linguistic area (Trubetzkoy 1923, 1930). Moreover, Balkan Slavic figured in Jakobson’s (1957) seminal definition of the category ‘evidential’, although the areal origin of the category in Bulgarian had already been proposed by Conev (1910/1911). Conev’s own understanding of the category can ultimately be traced back to the 11th century Turkic lexicographer Maḥmūd al-Kāšǧarī (Dankoff 1982). Across the Black Sea from the Balkans, the Caucasus has also been proposed as a linguistic area, although Tuite (1999), using ergativity as his diagnostic, makes it clear that the Caucasus is not a Sprachbund in the Trubetzkoyan sense. In this talk, based on more than four decades of fieldwork in the Balkans and the Caucasus as well as the writing of a chapter for the just-appeared Oxford Handbook of Evidentiality (Friedman 2018), I will examine the origins and meanings evidentiality, discuss their relevance for the Balkans and for the Caucasus as linguistic areas, and look beyond those regions to greater Eurasia and across the Pacific to the Americas for additional evidence of internal versus external origins.
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