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Evidential mood

Grammar
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A grammatical mood indicating how the speaker knows something—e.g., through direct observation, hearsay, or inference—common in some languages.

Detailed Definition
Evidential mood is a grammatical category in certain languages (e.g., Turkish, Quechua) that indicates the source or reliability of information—whether witnessed, inferred, reported, or assumed—rather than merely stating fact; while English lacks a formal evidential system, poets may simulate it through modal verbs, hedging language, or narrative framing (“they say,” “it seems,” “I heard”) to explore epistemological uncertainty, rumor, or mediated truth, as in ballads or testimonial poetry where knowledge is always filtered through perception or hearsay.
Example
Example in poetry:
Native American oral traditions use evidential mood to mark source of knowledge; Inuit poetry distinguishes witnessed vs. hearsay; Quechua poetry marks evidentiality grammatically; contemporary poets like Layli Long Soldier use evidential mood in “Whereas” to question official documents; Craig Santos Perez marks evidentiality in Chamorro poetry; experimental poets like M. NourbeSe Philip use fragmented syntax to imply evidential uncertainty.
Additional Notes
Grammatical mood indicating how speaker knows information (witnessed, heard, inferred). Linguistic term. Affects meaning in evidential languages. Related: grammatical mood. Example: many Native American languages.
Also Known As
Witnessed mode Testimonial aspect Source-marking mood Evidence-based voice
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