Evidentiality and validation in past tenses of Andean Spanish.

Abstract

Based on a sample of linguistic and metalinguistic interviews both in Ecuador and in Spain, the article presents an in-depth study of a contact induced change in Andean Spanish. Bilingual speakers of Quechua and Spanish are found to assume that Spanish should display a formal opposition of evidentiality vs. non-evidentiality, obligatory in Quechua. In a long term process labeled as indirect contact induced change, both the simple past and the present perfect tense forms are re-categorized as evidentiality vs. non-evidentiality. A fine grained analysis of various paths of grammaticalization in different varieties of Spanish reveal the Spanish tense forms as well motivated candidates for this kind of re-functionalization. The affinity speakers perceive between the chosen tense forms and the two forms of evidentiality is shown to be triggered by the existing vs. missing link of the tense-form with the moment of speech.