摘要
Evidentiality is the linguistic representation encoding the source of the said proposition and indicating its credibility,and also embodies the speaker’s assessment of information sources and the involvement in the said proposition.In the field of typology as rationale,the present study introduces the development of evidentiality in five stages,explores the definitions of evidentiality in the broad and narrow senses as well as grammatical and lexical evidential markers,and then illustrates non-grammatical evidential systems with English and Chinese examples,which provides a perspective for future empirical discourse studies in languages with only lexical evidential markers.