Thursday, March 6, 2014

Detail 80: Nestedness and evidentiality marking

In some language with evidentiality marking, let this marking only apply to the outermost VP in a clause. Any nested verb will be marked as being nested simply by having evidentiality-marking that is lower in a reliability-hierarchy than the main verb; the marking will be somewhat incomplete, though, to distinguish it from real evidentiality; usually, the lower verb is marked as 'inference', although a dead-end unusu:

Heok ti.ebel.xe.d ti.dustun.en -> Heok 3sg.stay.past.EYEWITNESS 3sg.guard.INFERENCE (note the lack of tense) -> Heok remained guarding

Mbi eli .jewil.sa. ti.kustap.en Heok tutri -> I not [1st person, empty marking in negative present tense].know.[present tense].[no evidentiality marking for first person on verbs of emotion and mental processes] 3sg.read.INFERENCE Heok sheet.acc -> I do not know if Heok read the sheet (=newspaper) 

For things where there's an order or such given, an actual mood marking will be used instead of evidentiality, e.g.
he told them to go away -> 3sg.tell.past.[whichever is applicable] imperative.plur.depart.
Oftentimes, the embedded verb will be to the right of any verbs that command it, thus giving an extra clue for disambiguation in cases where i.e. both the imperative and a low-evidentiality verb could be the main one.

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