Evidentials as epistemic modals: Evidence from St’át’imcets

This paper argues that evidential clitics in St’át’imcets (a.k.a. Lillooet; Northern Interior Salish) introduce quantification over possible worlds and must be analyzed as epistemic modals. We thus add to the growing body of evidence suggesting that the functions of encoding information source and encoding epistemic modality are not necessarily distinct. However, St’át’imcets evidentials differ from English modal auxiliaries not only in that the former explicitly encode the source of the speaker’s evidence, but also in that they do not encode differences in quantificational force. We therefore argue that distinguishing quantificational strength is not an intrinsic property of modal elements. With respect to the syntax-semantics interface, we argue on the basis of data from St’át’imcets against attempts to establish a universally fixed position for evidentials in the functional hierarchy. We conclude that evidentiality is not a homogeneous category, either semantically or syntactically. On the semantic side, cross-linguistically and even * We are very grateful to St’át’imcets consultants Gertrude Ned, Laura Thevarge, Rose Agnes Whitley and the late Beverley Frank. We are also very grateful to Rose-Marie Déchaine, Martina Faller, Angelika Kratzer and Martina Wiltschko for helpful feedback and suggestions, as well as audiences at the University of British Columbia, the Paris Conference on Time and Modality, and the 41st International Conference on Salish and Neighbouring Languages. Errors are our own. This research is supported by SSHRC grants #410-2002-1715, #410-2203-1138, and #410-2005-0875.