A comparative approach to evidential tense in Quechua and Aymara

Abstract This paper discusses tense markers that convey an indirectness implication by comparatively analyzing sentences with the past tense suffixes -sqa in Cuzco Quechua and -tayna in Southern Aymara. The main contribution is to provide support for a (non-modal) evidence acquisition time analysis of these markers, which, I claim, is to be preferred over an analysis that relies on spatio-temporal distance and speaker perception. I provide novel data that highlight that acquiring evidence for a proposition is the key factor in the cases under examination (instead of relying on perceptual distance). I further show that ‘late realization’ scenarios are not possible in these languages, and discuss how the evidence acquisition time analysis captures this. The discussion provides the first systematic comparison between Cuzco Quechua and Southern Aymara from the perspective of formal semantics, which supports the well-known descriptive statement in the Andean literature that the grammars of these languages are parallel.