Evidentiality, time, and inference in the New Guinea Highlands

<p>Certain languages of New Guinea show a close attention to time and evidence within their evidential systems.These languages position the moment that one apprehends an event, either directly or through other signs, assomething not only worth talking about, but worth contrasting in grammar. The paper presents examples fromthese languages and identifies that even within this small area there is a range of semantic and structuralpossibilities for evidential time reference. Perhaps this points to speakers’ creative responses to communicativeneeds once evidence becomes of grammatical concern; how to convey not only the time something happens, butalso the time or place that one learned of it, and even how this implicates features of the addressee’s access toknowledge. Discussion focuses on situations of inference about past events and on independent declarativeclauses, but extends to examples concerning direct evidence, future events and non-verbal predicates.</p>