A Study of Evidentiality in Arabic and English

Abstract

This paper focuses basically on some semantic frames and syntactic structures by which evidentiality is depicted and illustrated. Firstly, different definitions of evidentiality are introduced in order to provide a profound understanding of this linguistic category. Secondly, this paper deals with how evidentiality has been investigated in other languages, namely, English. Thirdly, evidentiality in Arabic and the main semantic frames and syntactic structures used to show it are deeply investigated by explaining the main evidential devices used in Arabic, such as, the lexical ones.