Indirect evidentiality deriving from temporal uncertainty

This paper examines the Japanese temporal approximative goro ‘around’. When it combines with ima ‘now’, which denotes the utterance time, the phrase ima-goro signals that the speaker does not directly witness the event described by the co-occurring predicate (so-called indirect evidentiality). When goro combines with other time expressions, this effect is not observed. I propose a semantic account that capture this phenomenon. Specifically, X-goro requires that the speaker is uncertain whether the described event occurs at X. It is also demonstrated that the proposed analysis has implication for two additional phenomena: i) ima-goro can mean that the occurrence of the described event is too late, and ii) there is an aspectual restriction on ima-goro. Finally, a remaining issue concerning the English temporal phrase by now is discussed.