Evidentials in Chinese

Abstract

Evidentiality has long been a heated topic in the field of linguistics recently. It focuses on the source of information and language user’s attitude towards the reliability of information. It first aroused in the study of Indian languages. Then, linguists pay more and more attention to evidentiality. This paper would first introduce the history, definition and classification of evidentiality, and then several related notions will be detailed with comparison to evidentiality. After a brief understanding of evidentiality, this paper will further introduce some evidentials in Chinese based on Hu’s model of evidentiality.