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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Rosaleen Howard
This chapter discusses the working of evidentiality in Quechua narrative performance from the central highlands of Peru. In the Quechua narratives analysed, the grammatical marking of source and status of knowledge, and discursive ways of expressing evidence for knowing what is known, are shown to vary strikingly according to performance related factors. On the one hand, narrators base discursively expressed evidence for knowledge, and the veracity and authenticity of the stories they tell, on lived experience. On the other hand, in Huamalíes Quechua the assertion of knowledge and affirmation of validity are grammatically marked by evidential, epistemic modality, and tense suffixes. Taken together, the performative dimensions of discursively expressed evidence, and grammatical choices around evidentiality, constitute the epistemological underpinning of stories about the past in Huamalíes Quechua; both are taken into account in the mixed methods approach to the analysis of Quechua narrative adopted here.
Author(s): Howard R
Editor(s): Aikhenvald A
Publication type: Book Chapter
Publication status: Published
Book Title: Oxford Handbook of Evidentiality
Year: 2018
Pages: 222-242
Print publication date: 25/01/2018
Acceptance date: 16/01/2017
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Place Published: Oxford
Library holdings: Search Newcastle University Library for this item
ISBN: 9780198759515
