Speas on Evidentials

Peggy Speas (with Carol Tenny). “Evidential Paradigms, World Variables and Person Agreement Features”:http://www.umass.edu/linguist/people/faculty/speas/worldagr.pdf. to appear in special issue of the Italian Journal of Linguistics. This version here is a draft, and is more or less what was presented at GURT 2004, April 27, Georgetown University.

bq. Person marking spells out the relation between a given argument and a discourse role. It has long been observed that agreement paradigms spell out a very restricted subset of the logically-possible discourse roles, and that person features are hierarchically organized. (See Benveniste 1956, Harley and Ritter 2002.) In this paper, I will explore the idea that these restrictions on agreement have a parallel in the domain of evidential morphemes. I will argue that evidential morphemes are person agreement morphemes. I claim that evidential agreement paradigms specify the same restricted set of syntax-discourse relations as standard nominal agreement, but the argument specified by evidential agreement is a “world argument” rather than a nominal argument. The presence of a world argument in syntax will be supported by showing that worlds have syntactic properties parallel to those of entities (pronouns) and times (tenses). I will show how this view clarifies the relationship between modals and evidentials, and suggests interesting ways of restricting the inventory of possible projections in the left periphery of the clause.

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