A survey of three adverbial clitics in Purepecha and their relation with evidentiality and epistemic modality

Abstract

This paper describes the evidential clitic =nha in Purepecha, alongside two other clitics of epistemic value: =mintu and =xeru. It is shown that =mintu expresses a high degree of certainty, while =xeru corresponds to a low degree of certainty. Moreover, the use of =mintu does not present restrictions as to whether the evidence is direct or indirect, unlike languages like Spanish or English, where the
use of a modal of epistemic necessity is only felicitous in contexts of indirect evidence (von Fintel and Gillies 2006).