Andean Aymara

The Americanists in the Netherlands event, AiN6, is scheduled for tomorrow afternoon at the Radboud Universiteit in Nijmegen (details on their website).

I will be presenting a talk entitled ”Expressing degrees of certainty: A sketch of the Aymara evidential system”. The abstract is below. If you’re in the area, why not stop by.

The Aymara evidential system encodes four evidentials: two are inherent in the distinction between the distal/proximal past (Hardman’s remote-indirect-knowledge vs near-remote),and the other two resemble in many ways enclitics: the inferential past -pacha and the conjectural (or dubitive) -chi. In some contexts, it may make sense to add the root sa- ‘to say’ to this tally of evidentials as it conveys second/third-hand knowledge.

This talk gives a precursory overview of the behavior of these suffixes, takes stock of some non-elicited examples gathered in an undocumented variety, Muylaq’ Aymara, and mentions a handful of ambiguous cases.

Keywords: evidentiality, Aymara, tense