Evidentiality in Malayalam (a Dravidian language)

This paper is an initial attempt to examine evidentiality in Malayalam, a Dravidian language spoken in an Indian state of Kerala. One-quarter of the world’s languages express evidentiality through exclusive morphemes. On the contrary, Malayalam expresses evidentiality in structurally diverse ways. The Malayalam expression ɾaʋi paːʈijen̪n̪ə keːʈʈu (‘[Somebody] Heard that Ravi has sung’) exemplifies how the language conveys reported information through a combination of the complementizer en̪n̪ə ‘that’ and the auditory verb keːʈʈu ‘heard’. This paper describes the structure and distribution of evidential constructions across various morphosyntactic categories in Malayalam. It is argued that Malayalam employs alternative mechanisms to encode evidential distinctions, unlike many languages worldwide.