Evidential meaning and (not-)at-issueness

Natasha Korotkova

Abstract: Recent years have seen a lot of research on evidentiality within formal semantics and pragmatics. The near-consensus in the literature is that the type of evidence signalled by the evidential marker, which I will refer to as the Evidential Requirement (ER), is not asserted and should be analyzed as a conventional trigger of Not-At-Issue (NAI) content. By scrutinizing empirical diagnostics previously used to support the ER-as-NAI view, the paper aims at disentangling how different notions of (not-)at-issueness can be applied to evidentiality, and develops objections to the idea that evidentials always conventionally encode NAI content.