Blurb:

Chapter 5, The evidential construction as a type of assertive speech act, examines the evidential as found in modern Irish as a type of assertive speech act. Irish uses a combination of lexical syntactic, and potentially adverbial, means within an evidentiality strategy to signal information about knowledge source. The language also has a rich repertoire of evidential adverbials that are frequently deployed. The conceptual domain of evidentiality, based on (Aikhenvald 2003:1), is understood as stating the existence of a source of evidence for some information; that includes stating that there is some evidence, and also specifying what type of evidence there is. In the evidential strategy of Irish, the evidential reporting of facts in the world based on a knowledge source is understood as stating the fact plus the existence of a source of evidence for some information, including that i) there is evidence, and ii) specifying the actual type of evidence. A mix of lexical, syntactic and adverbial means is used in this strategy within Irish to encode this asserted evidential information.