Detail #73: Narrative and poetic use of evidentiality

Evidentiality has become somewhat popular, and the kinds of question you see on conlanger forums often relates to how it's dealt with in indirect speech, whether there's separate evidentialities for stories and poetry, etc.

I came up with a particular set of neat ideas for how evidentiality could be used in narratives and in poetry, but these usages have implications for the use of evidentiality throughout the language.

1. Ascending Evidentiality
Often, in poetic contexts, evidentiality tends to ascend - within a stanza, it is rather seldom that a verb has a less strong evidentiality than a previous verb has. Thus, when praising a king or the beauty of a woman or flower or whatever, the intensity of the evidentiality with which the poet has experienced the greatness/beauty/etc grows, while also possibly other details go towards more intense strengths as well - stronger adjectives, greater deeds, etc.

2. Descending evidentiality in narratives and plays
Often, the audience is informed that a character is being deceptive by his repeating similar lines with clearly weakening evidentiality, here given as if translated into English:

I have witnessed how he plans the deed, I have inferred that he's up to something, I have heard rumors that he will kill you, I suspect that he is out for your life

Sometimes, a descending evidentiality chain is broken - thus basically being a short plot twist - suspected deceiver was honest all along.

What we can deduce about the language where this feature exists as far as grammar goes is that evidentiality is not stacked or changed in indirect speech - the verb form used by the person making the original utterance is usually preserved. We also clearly can tell that narratives use the usual evidentialities, rather than some kind of 'fictive evidentiality' or other notions that some conlangers have played around with.