evidentialityn

Evidentialityn is a proposed linguistic category that encodes the source and reliability of information in a clause. The term fuses evidentiality with the suffix -n and is used in theoretical discussions or in constructed languages to illustrate how speakers signal how they know what they report.

It can be realized as a grammatical marker attached to verbs, nouns, or sentence-final particles, and it interacts with tense, mood, and agreement. Typical functions include direct (perceptual or experiential), indirect (inferred), and reported or quotative evidence. An evidentialityn marker thus communicates the speaker’s epistemic stance and whether the information was witnessed, inferred, or heard from others.

Cross-linguistic work on evidentiality notes that real languages vary in how information source is coded; some use verb-internal markers, others use sentence-final particles, and some divide evidentiality into multiple categories. Evidentialityn serves as a formal abstraction to compare these strategies and to explore how robustly source information shapes discourse, trust, and stance.

Example: In a hypothetical language with evidentialityn, the verb may carry the marker -evidentialityn to indicate source. Direct evidence: “I see-evidentialityn the bird,” meaning I observed the bird with my own eyes. Indirect evidence: “The nurse says-evidentialityn the patient recovered” would mean the patient recovered, according to reports.

See also: evidentiality, quotative, epistemic modality, language typology.