A semantic classification of evidentials

Chapter 2 introduces an empirical classification of evidentials across languages. This chapter discusses semantic diagnostics from the literature, illustrating them with representative languages, and shows how Cheyenne fits into this classification. While there are several dimensions of variation, there are also striking crosslinguistic generalizations, with evidentials sharing a core set of properties. This points to the need for a unified analysis that can capture these shared properties, treating evidentials crosslinguistically as a natural semantic class, while being fine‐grained enough to account for the variation. Where evidentials differ across languages, Cheyenne patterns with certain languages on some diagnostics, but with different languages on others, providing further support for a unified theory.