The experiential perfect as an evidential marker in Sinitic languages

This paper investigates a set of verb enclitics in Sinitic languages, including Mandarin kuo55, Cantonese Yue kwo33, and Shanghainese Wu ku31 as well as functionally-related preverbal markers in the Min dialects such as Taiwanese bat and Fuzhou peik31 tseing52. These have commonly been described as experiential aspect markers used to indicate that an event has taken place at least once in the past (see, for example, Comrie 1976: 58). The main purpose of this study is to challenge the view that this category is primarily aspectual in the case of Sinitic languages. After discussion of the syntactic and semantic features of these markers in eight Sinitic languages in terms of prototype theory, I argue that the experiential aspect in Sinitic languages should be reclassified as an evidential marker. The analysis shows that the relevant marker in each Sinitic language is used to express the speaker's commitment to the truth of the proposition, namely, certainty about the occurrence of an event. One use of these markers can be classified as a kind of inferential evidential, since the source of information is based on an inference made from an observable result state (cf. Willett 1988: 57). The other use is as an immediate evidential of personally experiencing an event (hence the traditional label). This conditions a person split. Other non-core uses are also examined such as imperatives of repeatability expressing ‘do a certain event again', and marking the verb in the protasis of conditionals. Further extensions of meaning for these evidential markers are found in constructions of ‘partial effect' and as a phase complement marker of completion in Mandarin. It is shown how these are semantically linked with the prototypical meaning through discussion of the grammaticalization process of these markers from two main sources: verbs meaning ‘to cross, pass through' which are cognate in most Sinitic languages, or verbs meaning ‘to know' in Min dialects. This is the first study to analyse this grammatical category in Sinitic as a whole