Evidential Types: Evidence from Cree Dialects1

Evidentials, which introduce the speaker’s perspective regarding information being presented, can be divided into at least two classes in Cree: CP‐external (with illocutionary force) and IP‐external (with temporal or modal force). Cree dialects differ in their deployment of evidentials. CP‐external evidentials include quotative verbs (attested in all Cree dialects) and reportative particles (in Plains Cree). IP‐external evidentials include dubitative particles (in Plains Cree) as well as affixal indirect evidentials that are temporally conditioned (in Cree/Montagnais/Naskapi). The proposed analysis of evidential types in Cree dialects lends support to the Evidential Domain Hypothesis (Blain and Déchaine 2006) that claims that evidentials differ from each other according to the syntactic domain in which they are introduced.

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