Evidentiality in historical Southern African American English

Evidentiality marking (i.e. surely... I think... seems like...) in English is relatively understudied (Bednarek, 2006:635), and research conducted has largely considered standardized dialects in the United States and Britain. This analysis is a unique contribution to the study of the linguistic marking of speaker stance as I explore the occurrence of evidential marking in 1930s Southern African American English oral narratives from South Carolina. I adopt a broad perspective of evidentiality, considering the marking of speaker attitude towards the reliability of a proposition and its evidence. This analysis first looks at how speakers linguistically express evidential attitude towards the information they convey, exploring the roles of evidential aspects and discourse strategies in this expression. I conclude that the marking of evidentiality in the narratives is achieved by a large variety of forms including lexical, phrasal, and clausal which utilize a number of ways speakers express their commitment to information. By taking a broader perspective, unique ways in which the speakers convey evidential aspects are found to reveal features of the speakers cultural and ethnic identity as southern African American orators. This study contributes to our understanding of evidential marking in languages without grammaticalized systems as well as adding to the semantic/pragmatic perspective of the history and development of African American English and other dialects of English spoken in the United States.