Evidential Strategies in Spanish: Analysis of a Variety of Spanish in Contact with Quechua

Abstract

In this work we intend to describe the cognitive processes that intervene in the correlative use of some verbal tenses in the narrative productions of subjects that find themselves in situations of Quechua-Spanish contact and to what degree of relationship such uses maintain with the linguistic structures of the contact language. We are interested in explaining what the selection operations consist of which the enunciators carry out in the principal verb of each proposition in the present or the past and the subordinate verb in the preterit perfect simple or the pluperfect of the indicative mood. We postulate that such a selection is linked with evidential strategies through which the enunciator emphasizes certain information with respect to the rest and marks, especially in the choice of the subordinate verb, the degree of commitment established with the referential content transmitted by the enunciator in direct relation with the basic meaning of the forms in variation.