In
linguistics,
evidentiality is, broadly, the indication of the nature of evidence for a given statement; that is, whether
evidence exists for the statement and/or what kind of evidence exists. An
evidential (also
verificational or
validational) is the particular
grammatical element (
affix,
clitic, or
particle) that indicates evidentiality. Languages with only a single evidential have had terms such as
mediative,
médiatif,
médiaphorique, and
indirective used instead of
evidential.