Talk:Evidentiality
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[edit] Cleanup
After reading the intro section, I had no idea what evidentiality is. I understood (very well, thank you) that there are several ways that someone could have evidence of an event, but I was still in the dark about how this relates to linguistics. And, for all that, the intro is too long. On a cursory look through the rest of the article, I noticed that it talks about a bewildering array of forms of evidentiality, but doesn't seem to explain how they all relate to each other. --Smack (talk) 05:34, 8 March 2006 (UTC)
- hi. Thank you for the comments — these are what i wanted.
- the main point of the article is to demonstrate how the several ways that someone could have evidence of an event may be indicated through language. You could simply say where you got the info (like "Smithy told me that ..."). Some languages use adverbial-type words or phrases to express the evidence. However, more interestingly, some languages have an inflectional category that is used to indicate the evidence. These languages must, for instance, have grammatical suffixes/prefixes that must occur on verbs, just like some languages require grammatical elements that indicate tense, aspect, person, subject/object agreement, gender, mood, and/or number (among other things). So, you must conjugate verbs according to evidentiality in these languages.
- all of the bewildering array of forms are related in that they all have to do with evidentiality. I thought this would be understood. Do you think not?
- i lengthened the intro following a suggestion from a fellow editor. Perhaps it should be shortened.
- does this help make this clear? If so, how can we help to make the article clearer & more accessible using what we understand here?
- by the way, i read linguistics stuff almost everyday so, i may not be the best judge of how accessible these technical topics are to a general reader.
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- Sorry if I didn't make my point clear, but I think you missed it. Have a look at the changes I just made. Also, please avoid using HTML formatting features to turn wiki into a word processor. If you like to play with cool features, check out Wikipedia:How to edit and related pages. Also, it would be really nice if someone could convert the footnotes to the Wikipedia:Footnotes format. --Smack (talk) 04:35, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
- P.S. I guess those "footnotes" aren't actually footnotes. Maybe you would be better off using the Wikipedia:Footnote3 format. --Smack (talk) 04:39, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Cleaup removed
I just removed the cleanup tag. As I take it, the article does a good job at explaining and detailing the complex linguistic subject of evidentiality. As any article, it could be improved still, but it is definitely not in the league of articles needing cleanup. — mark ✎ 10:18, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
