Indirect evidentiality markers in Inuktitut: personal experience or not?

Les marqueurs d'évidentialité indirecte en inuktitut : expérience vécue ou pas ?

Marc-Antoine Mahieu (1, 2)

1 LACITO - Langues et civilisations à tradition orale
2 Inalco - Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales

In Inuit, grammaticalized semantic categories, i.e., those which must always be encoded in order to transmit information, may be included among the derivational morphemes preceding the inflection in a word. This occurs notably with time, though the ways in which time is grammaticalized vary from one dialect to another. This paper is intended to show that this is also so, at least to some extent, of indirect evidentiality in Nunavik Inuktitut, the dialect spoken in the Arctic region of Quebec. This will become clear only if the prevailing view of certain very frequent bound morphemes is revised. Four evidentiality markers involving some degree of grammaticalization are examined. Analysis shows that -nniq- or -lirniq- must be used to speak of a past which is outside the speaker’s (conscious) experience; -viniq will be used for something the speaker can no longer experience as such within the lapse of time referred to by the utterance; -tsaq is required for something the speaker cannot yet experience within the lapse of time referred to by the utterance; and -guuq will appear when the speaker reports someone else’s views. Direct evidentiality markers do not seem to be grammaticalized.

Mots clés: Inuktitut; indirect evidentiality; derivation and grammaticalization

Mots clés: évidentialité indirecte; dérivation et grammaticalisation

Domaines: Linguistique

Marc-Antoine Mahieu. Les marqueurs d'évidentialité indirecte en inuktitut : expérience vécue ou pas ?. Amerindia, 2016, Questions de sémantique inuit / Topics in Inuit Semantics, 38, pp.145-176. ⟨hal-01411743⟩