Sunday 20 June 2010

Evidentials focus

As mentioned before, the evidentials can be affixed to verbs, nouns or adjectives with different results. In fact in a sentence the place where one affixes the evidentials makes subtle changes in the sense of the sentence. For example, if we go back to our sample sentence: qappaka pile.

Using the "hear-say evidential" we can get qappakan pile or qappaka pilen. The first one means "I've heard I eat fish", while the second would be closer in meaning to "Fish is what I've heard I eat". The difference is very subtle, but can be used for rhetorical purposes.

In fact qappakach pile means "I assume I eat fish", but qappaka pilech means "I assume that what I eat is fish". That's why a sentence like qappaka piles sounds a lot like "What I'm eating IS fish". Depending where the evidential is placed the focus shifts.

4 comments:

  1. Seems logical and very useful. Like it.
    But when does one add the -i after, for instance, the "hear-say evidential"'s -n(i)?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Well, that has to do with the fact that the verb ending is ma, ka, da, ta for the present and man, kan, dan, tan for the past, as I will post shortly. That's why, to avoid confusion, the evidential takes the long form -ni. Also to avoid difficult pronunciations such as kan-s "fact evidential" where it shifts to its long form -kansi.

    This will be posted shortly.

    ReplyDelete
  3. That is very clever, using evidential markers also for focus. I shall have to use this myself some time. :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Well, thank you so much! I'm glad you liked it. :)

    You can even use long evidentials where you would use the short ones to make a kinds of emphasis, also the last vowel would probably receive the stress when doing this. Compar: qappakas "I am eating" to qappakasí which would sound closer to "I am eating, man!"

    ReplyDelete