Category 1: Evidentiality

One of the relevant semantic categories I am analyzing perfects with is that of evidentiality.

Evidentiality is concerened with how a speaker knows about a certain event. In some languages, such as Turkish, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Arumanian, Albanian, Georgian, and Estonian (and probably many more!) the grammar requires the speaker to either confirm the truthfulness of what they are saying or at least indicate whether or not they have first-hand knowledge of something.

In Macedonian this distinction is usually made by contrasting two different grammatical explanations. For first hand knowledge (and by consequence the speaker's attestation of the event's actual occurence) a simple past is used as in the following example:

1) Macedonian confirmed past with imperfect

Toj beše vo Skopje.

He was-3sg.imp in Skopje.

‘he was in Skopje’ (I vouch for it)’

(Lunt 1952:93; see also Friedman 1993:272)

Whereas, speakers can distance themselves from the responsibility of vouching for the

occurence by using a perfect form made up of a 'to be' helping verb plus a past participle,

as in this example, below:

3) Macedonian nonaffirmative past with be + l-part

Toj bil vo Skopje.

He was-l-part-masc.sg in Skopje.

“He has been in Skopje.” or “He is/was in Skopje (apparently) / (much to my surprise) / (supposedly).”

(Elliot 2001: 19; see Friedman 1993: 272, Lunt 1953)

This particular distinction shows a lot of variation in Macedonian dialects, so it is of interest in my research. So far, my results show that in contexts where the event in question was not witnessed, this type of construction (the L-Perfect) was much more common, but other verb forms were also used. This may reflect differences in dialect or there may be further subtleties of the semantic sensitivities in the language that other categories also influence.

To cover all of the types of evidentiality in the survey,

I gave four different values for the contexts in the questionnaire: 1-witnessed, 2-not witnessed, 3-not likely to have been witnessed (where the context is not entirely clear as to whether or not there was a visual witness on the part of the speaker) and 4-irrealis (not pictured here), where the event is either hypothetical or in the future.

This analysis is based on only a part of the data so it is still incomplete. However, given the differences between 1 and 2, it shows that this is a really important factor in choosing which grammatical forms to use in Macedonian.