Aspects of epistemic modality in Tapirapé

This paper describes some of the resources used by speakers of Tapirapé, a language of the Tupi-Guarani family, to encode source and reliability of information. It is known that all languages possess some way to express the source of information, although not all of them express evidentiality as a grammatical category. Unlike Portuguese and other languages which employ lexical meaning to discriminate the source of information, it is evident that in Tapirapé the epistemic modality is expressed by means of particles which occupy the second slot in the sentence, and which may also express tense. In spite of the fact that tense is not a basic category in this language, and that there are no tense morphemes affixed to the verb, the expression of tense is intertwined with, and stems from, modality. Different particles which express the same stance of the speaker with regard to the uttered informational content express different types of tense. Most of the data presented here were obtained in real speech situations and collected in the Tapirapé/Karajá and Urubu Branco indigenous areas between 2002 and 2007.