Aguaruna speculative clause: Evidentiality meets focus

Abstract

The speculative clause in Aguaruna presents us with two distinctive and interacting semantic phenomena – evidentiality and focus – both of which have been objects of recent interest cross-linguistically. Following the alternative semantics theory of focus developed by Rooth (1992), I analyze Aguaruna's alternating speculative focus enclitics, and incorporate the evidentiality-focus complex into a compositional semantics for Aguaruna. By formally modeling the interplay of evidentiality and focus, this analysis hopes to glean a more precise understanding of each phenomenon individually, and to contribute to a more complete typology of both.