The evidential-temporal connection in a language without tense

University Of Southern California, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

Languages provide ways for speakers to indicate the type of evidence that forms the basis of their statements. When speakers of English modify a sentence with 'apparently', they convey that their evidence comes not from direct first-hand experience, but from either a report or an inference. Other languages make evidential distinctions with specialized evidential morphemes, which encode direct perceptual evidence or indirect reportative or inferential evidence. There is great variety in how evidentiality is expressed grammatically across languages, yet the kinds of evidential meanings that are conveyed are remarkably few and consistent, suggesting the involvement of grammatical constraints. To understand the grammar of evidentiality it is fruitful to study sentences with embedding verbs that explicitly encode evidence type, like 'see', 'hear', 'gather', and others that allow a range of evidential interpretations, like 'say', 'think', 'believe'. In addition to providing a point of comparison for evidential morphemes in terms of meaning, such verbs also allow the study of whether evidence can be dissociated from the speaker and attributed to the subject of the embedding verb. The mechanisms of evidential anchoring in contexts of embedding can be compared to those of temporal anchoring. Temporal morphemes situate events in time relative to the speech context, or to the main clause event in contexts of embedding. Understanding the orientation of evidentials in embedded contexts will advance our understanding of the role of syntactic structure in encoding such aspects of linguistic meaning. The project will study the links between evidentiality and temporality in Paraguayan Guarani, an indigenous language of the Tupi-Guarani family. The language has no tense, and some of its evidential morphemes express temporal meanings, providing a special perspective on the typological tendency for temporal morphemes to encode evidential categories. The researchers will ask native speakers of Paraguayan Guarani to evaluate and produce sentences in context. A corpus study of written texts will supplement the data gathered from participants. Of particular interest will be the distribution and interpretation of evidential morphemes in clauses embedded under verbs of speech, thought and perception. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.