Evidence Acquisition Time as Belief-State Change A View from Mvskoke (Creek)

Abstract

In some languages a single morpheme appears to encode both tense/aspect meaning and the evidential source for the assertion [7, 4, 5, 3, 9, 13]. I provide evidence from fieldwork that Creek (Muskogean) past tenses also encode evidentiality and show how the Creek data supports an approach which refers to Evidence Acquisition Time (EAT) [9, 13]. I then provide a novel formalization of EAT as the time the speaker’s belief-state changes and demonstrate how this can be extended to Bulgarian, Korean and Matses.