Enter the Graft Lab

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Up to four capabilities. The same dimensions on every row.

No score, no winner. Comparison is meant to make distinctions visible — where one capability preserves what another does not.

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Selection

02 / 4 selected

Band Dimension	01 Evidentiality Evidence and Knowledge	02 Modality, Obligation and Possibility Relationship and Responsibility
Layer · Expression
Plain-language question	How do we know this?	How certain, permitted or required is this?
Short definition	A grammatical or lexical distinction that marks the source of a speaker's information — whether directly observed, reported by another, inferred from evidence, or assumed.	Linguistic marking of what is necessary, possible, permitted or expected, as distinct from what is asserted as fact.
Layer · Structure
Information preserved	origin of a claim directness of observation identity of a reporting source basis for inference degree of speaker commitment	necessity versus possibility permission versus obligation expectation and prediction
Documented in	Tuyuca Tariana Turkish Quechuan varieties Japanese	None recorded.
Research status	Under review	Under review
Controversy	low	low
Layer · Computation
Code deficit (interpreted)	ordinary values usually retain only identity, value and type provenance is discarded or reduced to a free-text field systems cannot distinguish observation, report, inference and assumption structurally	boolean rules flatten a spectrum of obligation and permission AI instructions rarely distinguish must / should / may
Opportunities addressed	Provenance and evidence Contradiction detection	Uncertainty and confidence Explicit assumptions
Possible construct types	typed value (Inferred<T>, Observed<T>, Reported<T>) annotation (@inferred, @observed) wrapper object (Evidence.inferred(...))	Must<T>, May<T>, Should<T> annotations policy expressions with modal operators
Graft readiness	Interactive graft	Conceptualised
Interactive graft	Open Evidentiality Graft Lab →	None yet.
Limitations	Not every language marks evidentiality grammatically; many express it through discourse or vocabulary. Evidentials describe the speaker's stance, not an objective measure of truth.	Modality overlaps with evidentiality in some languages; the boundary is not universal.