Four distinctions the language does not mark, each of which the configuration needs unmarked. They were not removed by anybody, and that is the property that makes them hold.
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A missing construction does not announce itself. A speaker cannot notice the absence of a distinction she has never once been required to make, because nothing in the sentence she is building reports that a choice was available elsewhere and is not available here.
So the absences have to be found by comparison, and what comparison shows is that several of them fall in the same place. English does not mark, and therefore does not require a speaker to settle, four things the configuration is better off with unsettled.
[See THE IRREALIS · TRANSLATION CORRUPTIONS]
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THE FOUR
Who is inside the we. Many languages mark clusivity: one first-person plural that includes the person addressed and a different one that excludes her, in the pronoun or in the verb. English has a single we and the choice is never forced. So a speaker may say we love money and constitute a body without stating whether the hearer is in it, and she cannot tell from the sentence. In a language that marks it, he would have had to choose, and the choice would be on the record.
How the speaker knows. Many languages mark evidentiality in the verb: whether the speaker witnessed the thing, inferred it, or was told it. English marks none of it. She was difficult has one shape whether the speaker watched it happen or heard it at second hand from the person it is about. Testimony and hearsay are grammatically identical, and the unmarked form defaults to assertion.
What can be given up. Many languages mark alienability, distinguishing what a possessor can transfer from what he cannot. English gives one possessive to my arm, my wife, my house and my employee. So the grammar that says a relation and the grammar that says a holding are the same grammar, and every man has a property in his own person is a sentence only a language like this can build without anybody noticing the joint.
What is commanded of a thing. English can command you and cannot command it, having no third-person imperative, so a command addressed to a state of affairs arrives as a wish. That one is worked in full elsewhere.
[See DISQUALIFIED TESTIMONY · SELF-OWNERSHIP]
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AND THEY WERE NOT DESIGNED, WHICH IS WHY THEY HOLD
The reading these invite is that the language was shaped to hide these things. It was not, and the weaker claim is the stronger one.
Take the objection first, because it is correct. No European language marks clusivity. The gap is not English's peculiarity and no one arranged it, and an account that says otherwise can be dismissed by one page of a typology.
What happens instead is selection. A language offers what it offers, speakers elaborate what they are under pressure to say, and a gap nobody is under pressure to close stays open indefinitely. English does repair gaps when the pressure is there: it lost the second-person plural with thou and ye, and its speakers rebuilt one out of nothing, repeatedly and regionally, because they needed to address a group and be understood. It has built no evidential. Which distinctions get repaired is a fact about who had standing to feel the lack, and the parties who would need a witnessed-versus-reported marking are the parties whose accounts are the ones in question.
[See ENFORCED LEGIBILITY · THE GRAMMAR OF ADMISSIBILITY]
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THE LAW BUILDS BY RULE WHAT THE GRAMMAR WILL NOT CARRY
There is a proof of all this and it is sitting in every evidence code.
Because English does not mark how a speaker knows, a tribunal that needs to know cannot get it from the sentence. So the law constructs the distinction by procedure: the rule against hearsay, its exceptions, the oath, the requirement of personal knowledge, the whole apparatus for establishing what the verb declines to report. A rule against hearsay is what a language without evidentiality has to build in order to hold a trial.
And the rule reaches only the room. Outside it, in the meeting and the reference and the file, the unmarked form runs unchecked, which is why an account of her that nobody witnessed travels at the same grammatical weight as one that somebody did.
[See THE SECOND WITNESS · FREEDOM / LIBERTY]
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So the operations are not occluded by the language. They are unmarked by it, and unmarked is the more durable condition of the two.
An occlusion can be lifted, because something is covering something and the cover has an edge. An absent distinction has no edge and nothing to lift. A speaker who wants it must supply it by hand, in extra words, every time, against a default that costs nothing and reads as normal.
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