Abstract
The speculative clause in Aguaruna presents us with two distinctive and interacting semantic phenomena – evidentiality and focus – both of which have been objects of recent interest cross-linguistically. Following the alternative semantics theory of focus developed by Rooth (1992), I analyze Aguaruna's alternating speculative focus enclitics, and incorporate the evidentiality-focus complex into a compositional semantics for Aguaruna. By formally modeling the interplay of evidentiality and focus, this analysis hopes to glean a more precise understanding of each phenomenon individually, and to contribute to a more complete typology of both.
Highlights
This paper analyzes the interaction of focus with the speculative evidential modality in Aguaruna, an indigenous language of northern Peru belonging to the Chicham family.1 Among the indicative clauses in Aguaruna, the speculative clause exhibits a clean and compact paradigm of focus marking
The focus on Mary is interpreted at the level of the entire answer proposition (α = [Mary]F cut Bill down to size), implicating a set of alternative propositions indicated in the discourse tree (15) below (Rooth 1992:88) by the free variable B7, which plays the role of Γ in the Focus Interpretation Principle (FIP) and is introduced by the ∼ operator on the level of focus interpretation: (15)
I anticipate surveying this typology in search of evidentials that interact with focus as naturally as does the Aguaruna speculative modality, and seeing what further connections between the two phenomena we might draw from such findings
Summary
This paper analyzes the interaction of focus with the speculative evidential modality in Aguaruna, an indigenous language of northern Peru belonging to the Chicham family. Among the indicative clauses in Aguaruna, the speculative clause exhibits a clean and compact paradigm of focus marking. This paper analyzes the interaction of focus with the speculative evidential modality in Aguaruna, an indigenous language of northern Peru belonging to the Chicham family.. The speculative clause, among the 13 overall clause types in Aguaruna, is one of 4 types of indicative clauses – declarative, counter-expectation, narrative and speculative – each conveying the epistemic distinction their name suggests. This categorization conforms to the requirements for clausehood discussed in Sadock & Zwicky (1985) in that it is uniquely marked, and can not co-occur with markers designated for any other independent clause type.
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