semantics and pragmatics of evidentials in cuzco quechua

26 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION AND MAIN HYPOTHESES
This function takes the illocutionary act associated with simple assertions as its argument
and outputs the illocutionary act of assertion with the added sincerity condition.
Since the three evidential enclitics occupy the same morphological slot and have
the same functions, namely to indicate an evidential value and mark focus, I hypothesize
that all three denote the same semantic type. Thus, if the analysis proposed
for Direct -mi is correct, the Reportative -si and Conjectural -chá should also be analyzed
as illocutionary operators. That this analysis is also the right one for these
two enclitics is supported by the observation that they, too, do not contribute their
evidential meaning to the main proposition expressed. However, their analysis as
illocutionary modifiers is not as straightforward as that of -mi.
Since -chá is argued to be both an evidential and an epistemic modal, the meaning
of a sentence containing it can be represented as in (18).
(18) Para-sha-n-chá.
rain-prog-3-chá
q=‘It is raining.’
p=¦q
ill=asserts(¦q)
sinc={Bel(s, ¦q), Rea(s,Bel(s, ¦q))}
strength= -1
If my hypothesis is correct, that -chá is of the same type as -mi, then it should be
possible to give its meaning as a function that derives the meaning components in
(18) from those in (15). However, this is problematic, because this function would
operate both on the sincerity conditions as well as on the propositional content p.
This problem and possible solutions will be discussed in section 5.2.
In section 5.3, I will argue that a speaker who utters a sentence with the Reportative
does not perform any of the five basic speech acts recognized by Searle and
Vanderveken (see section 1.2.2), but a new kind, which I will call presentation.
(19) shows the sincerity condition that I propose to be associated with this speech
act.