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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Gabriel Martinez VeraORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
This paper discusses the discourse contrasts that arise in connection to direct evidentiality in Southern Aymara (henceforth, Aymara), an understudied Andean language. Aymara has two direct evidentials, the enclitic =wa and the covert morpheme -∅, which are used whenever the speaker has the best possible grounds for some proposition. I make the novel observation that a sentence with =wa can be felicitously uttered if the speaker attempts to update the common ground by addressing an issue on the table. In fact, the sentence with =wa that is uttered must be congruent with prior discourse; I tie this to the claim that =wa is a (presentational) focus marker (Proulx in Language Sciences 9(1):91–102, 1987). This paper thus claims that =wa is a marker that combines evidentiality and focus. In contrast, uttering a sentence with -∅ entails that the speaker’s contribution is already in the common ground, which likens this evidential to common ground management operators—there is no congruence requirement in this case. I identify which construction can be used in different discourse settings (conversation openers and telling anecdotes). I implement a formal analysis based on Farkas and Bruce (Journal of Semantics 27:81–118, 2010) and Faller (Semantics and Pragmatics 12(8):1–53, 2019) that links evidentiality and discourse.
Author(s): Martínez Vera G
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Natural Language Semantics
Year: 2024
Pages: epub ahead of print
Online publication date: 22/01/2024
Acceptance date: 20/12/2023
Date deposited: 22/01/2024
ISSN (print): 0925-854X
ISSN (electronic): 1572-865X
Publisher: Springer Dordrecht
URL: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-023-09220-1
DOI: 10.1007/s11050-023-09220-1
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