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Abstract

This paper discusses the differences between two grammatical means of conveying evidential contrasts in Cuzco Quechua, and argues that evidential interpretations can arise on different levels of meaning. In Quechua, evidential contrasts are encoded on the illocutionary level by a set of evidential enclitics. Evidential interpretations also arise with the past tense marker -sqa. These, it will be argued, are not encoded by -sqa but arise indirectly from an additional spatial meaning component, which requires that the described eventuality be located outside the speaker’s perceptual field at topic time. It is hypothesized that the distinction between illocutionary-level and event-level evidentiality is of cross-linguistic relevance.

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