This volume was conceived at a time when evidentiality was drawing special attention in semantics and pragmatics. Evidentials Fest 2011 was held at osu, where Matthewson (this volume) and Murray (this volume) were given. And Aikhenvald, though invited, could not be present. In the same year of 2011, the pre-jk (Japanese-Korean Linguistics Conference) 21 Workshop on Evidentials and Modals was held at Seoul National University, where many of the chapters in this volume were presented. Around that time, several Ph.D. dissertations on the Korean direct evidential -te- were produced in North American universities, mostly exploring the function of direct perception with regards to its prejacent. McCready and Ogata (2007) took a Bayesian view of evidence as increase in likelihood due to conditional update, using Japanese sentence final particles. Since Faller (2002), beyond the traditional categorial identification and typological explorations, more and more the formal nature of evidential elements was fruitfully investigated. Whether a modal categorial claim, a ‘modal analysis’ position, or a non-modal categorial position is taken, evidentiality is constantly discussed in relation to modality because of its evidential certainty and justification. (Another nice conference “Expressing Evidence” was held in Konstanz in 2019.) Therefore, we decided on the title of “Evidentials and Modals,” to be flexible, although most chapters are more concerned with evidentials.
We express our deep gratitude to all chapter authors for their patience; it took far more years than we originally expected. We apologize for this delay. Most of the chapters were already collected in 2012. The last chapter on Turkish evidential processing, however, was solicited in the summer last year. Some opted out in the meantime. We are grateful to Bill McClure for helping start the Introduction. We also express our gratitude to the series (CRiSPI) editors Ken and Klaus for their efforts. We hope that all the chapters by eminent or young and ambitious scholars in this volume will be influential to readers for years to come.
Jinho Park and Chungmin Lee