reportive

In linguistics, reportive (also called reportative) is a category of evidentiality that marks information as based on another's report rather than direct observation. Outside linguistics, the term can describe things related to reporting in general sense, but in scholarly contexts it refers to a grammatical device indicating source of information.

In languages with evidential systems, a reportive marker may appear as a mood, tense, or aspect suffix, a separate particle, or a sentence-final particle. It typically coexists with other evidentials that signal direct knowledge or inference. The primary function is to indicate the source of information, such as reported speech, hearsay, or claimed knowledge. Reportive markers help distinguish what the speaker has heard from what they have directly witnessed or deduced.

Across languages, reportive information is part of broader evidential typology, which also includes direct evidentials and inferential/evidential categories. English and many other languages rely more on reporting verbs (say, claim, report) and subordinate clauses to convey reported information rather than a dedicated grammatical marker. The study of reportive markers illuminates how languages encode speaker stance toward information and how they differentiate firsthand knowledge from information received secondhand.