evidential

Meanings

1. 1
   adj

   serving as evidence or relating to the evidence available for a claim

   The damaged lock had strong evidential value at the trial.

2. 2
   noun

   a grammatical marker that indicates the source or reliability of information

   The sentence uses an evidential to show that the speaker learned the news indirectly.

From Medieval Latin evidentialis, based on Latin evidentia ("clarity; proof") + -al. Linguistics later specialized the word for grammatical forms that encode how a speaker obtained information.

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