The Structure of Evidential Categories in Wanka Quechua (review)

This is a carefully written, closely argued examination of the use of the three evidential markers in Wanka Quechua, spoken in and around the city of Huancayo, Peru. While the fact is not mentioned anywhere in the book, it is a revised version of the author’s 1993 PhD dissertation, a Spanish translation of which has already appeared (La estructura categorial de los evidenciales en el quechua wanka, Lima, Peru: Ministerio de Educación and Instituto Lingüístico de Verano, 1997).

This book is an extremely important contribution both to studies of evidentiality and to studies of Quechuan languages. The analysis is based in a Langacker-style cognitive grammar framework, but it is clearly written with necessary theoretical concepts being explained, and an understanding of that framework is not required to follow the argumentation. The discussion and explanation is firmly grounded in an extensive use of illustrative sentences, primarily extracted from a corpus of conversations.

The book begins with an introductory chapter (1–11) giving an overview, a general discussion of evidentiality, and a brief introduction to Wanka Quechua. Following this is a chapter examining more closely the notion of evidentiality from a crosslinguistic point of view, looking at the relationship of information source and validation, and dealing with the formal and grammatical aspects of the evidential markers in Wanka Quechua (13–39). Ch. 3 (41–55) explains the theoretical underpinnings of the study, including the necessary concepts from cognitive grammar and how these relate to deictic notions and in particular to evidential categories.

Ch. 4 (57–92) deals with the direct evidential marker -m(i). It examines the prototypical use of this marker to indicate direct experience and the relationship between this information source and ideas of speaker certainty. I was particularly impressed here with the in-depth discussion of what constitutes direct evidence for a variety of different predicate types. This chapter also discusses the notions of control and intention and how these interact with various values of person, tense, and clause type (e.g. interrogative) to expand the use of the evidential beyond its prototype.

The semantics of the conjecture evidential -chr(a) are taken up in the following chapter (93–122). This marker prototypically encodes that the utterance to which it is attached is an inference, but it has a number of extensions, including into the validational domain of lack of commitment on the part of the speaker. It also extends to being used in interrogative constructions and to show irony and mild exhortation.

The final evidential marker, the reportative -sh(i), is examined in Ch. 6 (123–59). While the prototypical use of this marker is to indicate that an utterance is hearsay, it is also used in folktales, riddles, and ‘challenges’, where an addressee is encouraged to participate in an activity with the speaker. The chapter concludes with a very clear and convincing argument for why, despite some earlier descriptions, the reportative should not be considered as encoding any validational notion.

The final chapter (161–94) examines the interaction of the evidentials and the categories of person and tense, based on the notions of directness and proximity. It includes a particularly interesting examination of the frequency of co-occurrence of the evidentials with tense values and with person values in a corpus of fifteen conversations, together with proposed explanations for these correlations.

This work will be extremely useful in a number of areas. It provides a model for other work on similar markers found in other Quechua languages; while any grammar of any variety of Quechua makes reference to the cognate morphemes, it is often unclear from the descriptions precisely how and when these markers are used. Future studies will be able to compare the use of the evidentials with their use in Wanka Quechua. The book is also very useful more broadly, being one of the few extensive studies of the entire evidential system of a language which...