> In Chinese, one may of course indicate the gender of a third party, but this isn't mandatory, where in Romance languages, it is Romance languages have gender

> In Chinese, one may of course indicate the gender of a third party, but this isn't mandatory, where in Romance languages, it is Romance languages have gender as a grammatical category, and it exists on all nouns. Semantically, gender is arbitrary, except in the case of natural gender on animate nouns. The need to express the gender of a noun is a purely syntactic requirement, which Chinese does not have. It seems like a valid comparison, but it's not really. > If evidentiary particles are mandatory grammar, and that is the claim And that's probably not really true. Instead, there's a conflation of epistemic mode and tense (and maybe aspect because why not) the verb system, and that's all tangled up with the other affixes. It's not clear from the article, (or the paper I don't have time to wade through) if there's a default mode/tense that speakers use, and then only clarify when necessary. I get your point, but I think the actual facts are probably much less stark or interesting than the article makes out.