Evidentials |
Kashaya Grammar |
Evidentiality is a term for the nature of the evidence for a statement. For instance, did you see something happen, or did you just hear about it from someone else? We can make this distinction in English with optional phrases like I heard, they told me, I saw, but in some languages this is a special category. There are five evidential suffixes in Kashaya:
| Name | Function | Nonfinal | Final |
| Factual | Something is taking place, and the speaker can see it; or it is a generally accepted fact; imperfective | -(w)a | -(w) |
| Visual | Something has just taken place, and the speaker saw it; perfective | -ya | -y |
| Auditory | The speaker hears, or heard, something happen | -inna | -in |
| Circumstantial | The speaker infers that something is true based on known evidence or from observable results | -qa | -qʰ |
| Hearsay | The speaker has been told that something is true or happened, including in a traditional story | -do | -do |
Four of these suffixes end in a special vowel /ǎ/ that is deleted if no suffix or other element follows in the clause. When the Factual follows a consonant, the /w/ does not occur, and if not followed by other material, is has no realization. That situation is indicated by _ here but its presence is often clear by its effect on preceding sounds.
These examples from Oswalt 1960 illustrate the basic meanings of all the suffixes.
More details and examples are given in the following sections. The Evidentials are also used in forming relative clauses.
As Oswalt states, this suffix "is used for imperfective or uncompleted actions being watched by the speaker and also for facts or general truths which are known by everybody to be so, whether or not the action has actually been seen by the speaker."
It is frequently rendered as a present tense, but can also be translated as past or future if the action is long in duration or considered not completed.
These sentences illustrate general statements that do not necessarily describe the current moment.
This suffix "is used for perfective or completed actions which the speaker knows to be true because he saw them happen. When translated, it may be rendered by 'I saw'." It does not occur with the negative /-tʰ/ or after any Middle Group suffix ending in /d/ (including the Duratives), since these are imperfective in meaning.
If the /y/ causes debuccalization of a preceding consonant and is found at the end of the word, expected /hy/ or /ʔy/ usually undergoes metathesis to /yh/ and /yʔ/. This does not occur if the vowel /a/ is preserved.
Originally called Aural by Oswalt, but later changed to avoid confusion with the word oral. It "means that the speaker did not see what he is telling about but heard the sounds of the action."
This suffix "means that the speaker did not see happen what he is telling about but deduced the action from circumstantial evidence." It "may be translated variously by 'must have, seem to, evidently, apparently' but there is usually less doubt of the certainty of the action having happened than is implied by the English translations."
The Inferential, usually with the Absolutive to make /-bi-w/, is similar in meaning. Circumstantial /-qa/ "is the preferred suffix when the evidence is discovered soon after the action or is incontrovertible, but /-bi/ Inferential may be used in such cases and also when the inference takes more involved reasoning.""
This suffix "means that the speaker learned what he is talking about by hearsay only." It "occurs very frequently in the recounting of stories that have been learned from another."
"It may be suffixed to the main verb, but is usually attached to /ʔ/ Assertive which may succeed any word in the sentence (depending upon where the speaker wants to place the emphasis) but it customarily follows the introductory work or verb phrase linking the sentence with the preceding one."