The Deictic Core of 'Non-Experienced Past' in Cuzco Quechua

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Many typologically distinct languages express indirect evidentiality in their tense/aspect system. This paper studies the past tense marker ‐sqa of Cuzco Quechua which gives rise to indirect evidential interpretations. In Quechua, evidentiality is primarily expressed by a system of enclitics which specify the speaker's type of source of information as the best possible, reportative, or conjectural. This paper argues that ‐sqa is not of the same type as these enclitics. The latter encode an evidential relation between the speaker and the proposition expressed, but ‐sqa does not. ‐sqa does also not encode an epistemic relation as has been argued for similar markers of other languages. Instead, ‐sqa is analysed as a deictic element which locates the described eventuality outside the speaker's perceptual field at topic time. The evidential interpretations associated with ‐sqa arise only indirectly from this spatial meaning. The Quechua data suggest that two types of evidentiality have to be distinguished: propositional‐level evidentiality, which is a relation between the speaker and the proposition, and event‐level evidentiality, which, in the case of Quechua, is deictically induced.