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

Abstract

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.