Evidentiality in Neo-Aramaic? Behold! Some Scattered Notes

This paper proposes an initial discussion of a set of evidential strategies retrieved within the corpus of ethnotexts and folktales collected by Hezy Mutzafi (Wiesbaden, 2008) in the Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialect spoken in the village of Betanure (Iraqi Kurdistan). The paper aims to contribute to the modern scholarly debate on a variety of evidential strategies adopted by speakers of Semitic languages, which has mostly revolved around Biblical Hebrew and some Arabic dialects. Here, I aim to show that speakers of languages that lack morphological evidentiality can come up with strategies that, with time, are grammaticalized and used in regulated ways. These strategies do not encompass only presentatives (e.g., Hebrew we-hinneh), but also moods and tenses.