Evidentiality and Information Source Marking in Tiv: A Semantic and Pragmatic Study

This study investigates the expression of evidentiality and information source marking in the Tiv language of Benue State, North Central Nigeria, examining how speakers encode the source and reliability of their assertions. Evidentiality, defined as the grammatical or lexical encoding of the speaker's evidence for a proposition, is a well-documented category in many of the world's languages but remains inadequately described for most Nigerian languages. The research adopts a formal semantic methodology informed by de Haan's evidentiality typology and Aikhenvald's cross-linguistic evidentiality framework. Data were elicited from 30 native Tiv speakers in Makurdi and Gboko through structured elicitation sessions, narrative tasks, and semi-directed conversation recorded over a six-week period. The analysis examines lexical evidential markers, modal constructions used for evidential purposes, and the morphosyntactic position of evidential expressions in the clause. Findings document a lexically expressed evidential system in Tiv that distinguishes direct visual evidence, hearsay, and inference as three primary evidential categories, expressed through a combination of sentence-final particles and modal verb constructions. The study also identifies evidentiality-epistemic modality interactions that create a four-way source and certainty grid in Tiv assertion. This contribution fills a significant gap in the documentation of Tiv grammar and adds to the typological database of evidentiality in Nigerian languages. Keywords: evidentiality, Tiv, information source, semantics, Benue State.