Temporal constraints on the meaning of evidentiality

Evidentiality, Learning Events and Spatiotemporal Distance: The View from Bulgarian

“…the event of the speaker acquiring the relevant evidence for her claim. While the empirical focus is on Bulgarian, this work adds to previous proposals about evidentiality in typologically unrelated languages which aim to derive the intuition of secondary information from the relationship between times/events/situations (see Nikolaeva 1999;Fleck 2007;Speas 2010;Koev 2011;Kalsang et al 2013;Lee 2013;Smirnova 2013). The view of evidentiality as a spatiotemporal distance undermines the claim that evidential sentences in Bulgarian have modal force (see Izvorski 1997;Smirnova 2013) and correctly predicts that speakers are typically committed to the core proposition of the sentence.…”

“…We arrive at the following temporal picture. The proponents of the temporal account make two adjustments to this picture for evidential sentences (see Lee 2013;Smirnova 2013; see also Koev 2011): they introduce a "learning time" (LT) or the time at which the speaker learns the described proposition, and they assume that tense in evidential sentences is anchored to the learning time rather than the speech time. The temporal relation between the learning time and the speech time is determined by the evidential itself, which requires that the learning time precedes or overlaps with the speech time.…”

“…Given this background, I will present the temporal account of evidentiality in the next section. I will focus on the particular version of it defended in Lee (2013) and Smirnova (2013), and will only briefly mention Koev (2011).…”

“…In Section 2, I show that viewing indirect evidentiality as reporting non-witnessed events does not quite fit the meaning of the Bulgarian evidential. In Section 3, I critically examine the claim that Bulgarian evidential sentences encode a purely temporal relation between the described event and the event of acquiring the stated information (see Koev 2011;Lee 2013;Smirnova 2013). I demonstrate that the full range of data cannot be accounted for without also specifying the spatial location of these two events.…”

French future: Exploring the future ratification hypothesis

“…If the time of evaluation and of the modal coincide, the modal is not necessarily ratificational and can be conjectural. 13 Our account shares some features with Lee's (2012) analysis of Korean evidential -te. Lee has argued that -te expresses that the speaker has sensory information about the described eventuality and that this sensory information is available at the time of utterance.…”