Zum Ausdruck der Evidentialität im Baltischen: die litauische Partikel „nevà“
To Express Evidentiality in the Baltic: The Lithuanian Particle "nevà"

Summary/Abstract: Evidentiality is here understood as the linguistic marking of the speaker’s distance to the contents of his utterance. In Lithuanian, evidentiality can be expressed synthetically by means of the so-called relative mood, consisting in the use of participles instead of finite verb forms, or analytically by means of adverbs or particles. This paper deals with the origin of one of these particles, Lith. neva ‘allegedly’. It is not attested before the 19th century and seems to consist of the negative nè and the presentative particle vd. There are typological difficulties, however: evidentiality is never expressed by a bare negation; and presentative particles (like Lat. eccef Russ, com, French void, voilà) are known to be non-negatable. This suggests that nè in nevà cannot have had its basic negative meaning. We could therefore assume it to have been used in its comparative function (‘as, like’), which has left numerous relics in Baltic and could go back to Indo-European (cf. OInd. na ‘not’ and ‘as, like’).

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