ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses evidentiality and modality in the languages indigenous to North America. Evidentiality concerns the expression of source of information, while modality concerns the expression of possibility and necessity. The languages indigenous to North America have been of crucial importance to the development of semantic theories of these phenomena. We focus on the encoding of modal flavor and modal strength, how modal paradigms are organized, the overlap of modality and evidentiality, the kinds of meanings involved in evidential sentences, and how evidentials interact with different sentence types.
