Evidential Determiners: Best (Sensory) Evidence

GUTIÉRREZ, ANALÍA; LISA MATTHEWSON

SULA 6:Proceedings of the Sixth Meeting on the Semantics of Under-Represented Languages in the Americas (SULA 6) and SULA-bar

GLSA University of Massachusetts

Lugar: Amherst; Año: 2012; p. 63 - 79

The goal of this paper is to argue that determiners in two different languages Nivacle (Matacoan-Mataguayan) and St´át´imcets (Lillooet Salish) encode evidential distinctions. For Nivacle, we largely follow Gutiérrez (2010), who has shown that determiners in this language encode whether or not the speaker has had, at some point in the relevant individual´s lifespan, the best type of sensory evidence for the existence of that individual. In most, but crucially not all, cases this involves having had visual evidence of the individual. We then show that although the distinction encoded by Nivacle determiners differs from the primary distinction encoded by St´át´imcets ones (namely whether or not the speaker is willing to assert the existence of the individual; Matthewson 1998), the St´át´imcets assertion of existence determiners can be re-analyzed as also encoding an evidential distinction. However, the St´át´imcets evidential determiners rely on a distinction more parallel to that encoded by the Quechua best possible grounds evidential =mi (Faller 2002), which encodes not type of evidence source, but reliability of evidence. We thus see that two different types of evidential which are well established in the non-determiner domain can both be found also in the determiner domain.