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I would be skeptical of how seriously to take the interpretation in the article. There are huge differences between English and Matses, such that naively talki

I would be skeptical of how seriously to take the interpretation in the article. There are huge differences between English and Matses, such that naively talking what's encoded in the verb morphology is misleading at best. If you look at the section on verbs in the thesis on Matses, the author has this to say in the first paragraph: >Epistemic modality (e.g., -chit 'Uncertainty') and evidentiality (e.g., -nëdac 'Distant Past: Inferential', -ash 'Recent Past: Conjecture' and -denne 'Remote Past: Experiential') are coded in Matses by derivational suffixes or as part of the meaning of inflectional suffixes, while English uses adverbs and modals like perhaps, evidently, really, must, etc. Matses actually encodes the same information as English, it just does so through a series of particles attaches to the verb, which is not surprising in a highly synthetic language. Mind you, I haven't read all 1200+ pages, but I'd doubt the article's take on things.

samatman 6y ago
This depends on information I don't have access to. In Chinese, one may of course indicate the gender of a third party, but this isn't mandatory, where in Romance languages, it is. If evidentiary particles are mandatory grammar, and that is the claim, then uttering a sentence without including those particles would just sound wrong, the way the Russian tendency to leave off the article of a noun when speaking English sounds wrong to us. Native speakers simply wouldn't do so.
- meepmorp 6y ago
  > In Chinese, one may of course indicate the gender of a third party, but this isn't mandatory, where in Romance languages, it is Romance languages have gender as a grammatical category, and it exists on all nouns. Semantically, gender is arbitrary, except in the case of natural gender on animate nouns. The need to express the gender of a noun is a purely syntactic requirement, which Chinese does not have. It seems like a valid comparison, but it's not really. > If evidentiary particles are mandatory grammar, and that is the claim And that's probably not really true. Instead, there's a conflation of epistemic mode and tense (and maybe aspect because why not) the verb system, and that's all tangled up with the other affixes. It's not clear from the article, (or the paper I don't have time to wade through) if there's a default mode/tense that speakers use, and then only clarify when necessary. I get your point, but I think the actual facts are probably much less stark or interesting than the article makes out.

samatman 6y ago

This depends on information I don't have access to. In Chinese, one may of course indicate the gender of a third party, but this isn't mandatory, where in Romance languages, it is. If evidentiary particles are mandatory grammar, and that is the claim, then uttering a sentence without including those particles would just sound wrong, the way the Russian tendency to leave off the article of a noun when speaking English sounds wrong to us. Native speakers simply wouldn't do so.

meepmorp 6y ago
> In Chinese, one may of course indicate the gender of a third party, but this isn't mandatory, where in Romance languages, it is Romance languages have gender as a grammatical category, and it exists on all nouns. Semantically, gender is arbitrary, except in the case of natural gender on animate nouns. The need to express the gender of a noun is a purely syntactic requirement, which Chinese does not have. It seems like a valid comparison, but it's not really. > If evidentiary particles are mandatory grammar, and that is the claim And that's probably not really true. Instead, there's a conflation of epistemic mode and tense (and maybe aspect because why not) the verb system, and that's all tangled up with the other affixes. It's not clear from the article, (or the paper I don't have time to wade through) if there's a default mode/tense that speakers use, and then only clarify when necessary. I get your point, but I think the actual facts are probably much less stark or interesting than the article makes out.