Tim Thornes contributed a chapter in the newly released Oxford Handbook of Evidentiality titled “Evidentiality in the Uto-Aztecan Languages.”
Evidentiality involves the linguistic coding of source of information (hearsay, reported, visual, auditory, inferred and the like), and many languages have a dedicated grammatical subsystem that requires its use whenever one is making a declarative statement.
Thornes’ work explores both the range of evidential distinctions found in languages across the extensive Uto-Aztecan family as well as their formal encoding and finds reason to reconstruct a basic unmarked-direct/marked-indirect distinction alongside an inferential category.