Evidentials in Biased Questions

Diti Bhadra, Rutgers

Abstract

The occurrence of evidentials in interrogatives comes with a seemingly robust cross-linguistic package deal: evidentials are obligatorily anchored to the addressee in questions. I will present data from an understudied language, Bengali/Bangla, to attempt to forge a novel but important link between evidentiality and bias: obligatorily speaker-oriented evidentials exist and they make polar questions obligatorily biased.