Perfecto, antiperfecto, evidencial y admirativo: Decir un evento para comunicar dos

Abstract

Perfect, antiperfect, evidential and mirative: Saying one event to communicate two. Historical, typological, and contact linguistics have recognized the relationships among the categories of perfect, evidential and mirative. In this work, we propose that such relationships stem from a semantic-pragmatic ground common to those categories and the category of antiperfect. All of them designate one eventuality explicitly, but also introduce another speaker-related eventuality implicitly in the ongoing discourse. This basic meaning grounds the subjective and epistemic meanings tipically associated with the categories. Our proposal is illustrated with examples form Spanish, Mapudungun, Spanish in contact with American languages, and other languages.