Evidentiality in English and Central Kurdish: A Typological Study

This paper studies evidentiality in English and Central Kurdish (CK), specifically the dialect spoken by residents of Sulaimani, from a typological perspective. Typological studies are of interest to linguists, aiming to capture the commonalities and differences between languages regarding specific linguistic topics. One such topic is evidentiality, which is a linguistic category that marks the source of information upon which a statement is made (Aikhenvald, 2004). Different languages mark evidentiality in various ways. Some have dedicated grammatical markers, while others use lexical markers or other syntactic strategies. It is hypothesized that in English and Central Kurdish the expression of evidentiality is achieved through lexical, syntactic, or contextual strategies rather than grammatical markers. So, the paper is an attempt to identify the typology and the markers of evidentiality and, thereby, provide a new perspective on the topic in both languages. The main conclusion of this paper is that English and Central Kurdish are quite similar in regard to this topic since they do not grammatically mark evidentiality but make use of other means, specifically lexical markers.