The Cognitive Basis of Visual Evidentials FERDINAND DE HAAN University of New Mexico 1. Introduction 1 Vision plays an important role, both in language and in the external world. Almost everything in our lives is vision-oriented and this in turn has led to the spread of vision-oriented words into other cognitive realms. For instance, the English verb see is used in such tags as I see, to denote that understanding has taken place (this understanding may or may not be based on visual evidence), and a saying like seeing is believing which underlines the importance of vision for absolute proof (see Matlock 1989 for a discussion of this metaphor). In certain languages, vision forms a part of the evidential system. In these languages, it has been found desirable to have grammatical morphemes that denote that the action described in the sentence has been obtained visually. Surprisingly enough, it turns out that visual evidentials typically do not derive from vision words, such as the verb ‘to see’. Rather, they tend to develop from demonstratives or tense/aspect markers. This 1 This paper developed from presentations given at the First Workshop on American Indian Languages, Santa Barbara, 1998, and at CSDL 4, Atlanta, 1998. I am grateful for the participants at the conference for helpful comments as well as Victor Golla for data and two anonymous referees for very helpful comments.