Asymmetries between finiteness categories in the Tuparí language (Tupí family)

This paper examines the three grammatical categories which jointly mark finite clauses in Tuparí: clause type, tense, and evidentiality. I discuss the asymmetries which obtain between these three categories, focusing especially on the ways that evidentiality interacts with the other two. I show that the selection of clause type (syntactically, the highest of the three categories within the Tuparí clause) asymmetrically impacts the specification of the evidential contrast as [+WITNESSED] or [–WITNESSED]. I further show that tense and evidentiality impact one another: only past tense clauses can mark the witnessed/non-witnessed evidential contrast, and [–WITNESSED] clauses cannot use the full range of past tense morphology that is available in [+WITNESSED] ones. The paper concludes with a pair of figures which visualize these complex dependencies.