Evidentiality in carib Particles, affixes, and a variant of Wackernagel's law

Abstract Carib has two evidential verbal affixes and seventeen evidential particles. The present article treats successively their semantics, their syntax, and their interactions with person, tense, and mood. In sections 2 and 3, the evidential elements are presented and their meanings described. The fourth section deals in some detail with the grammar of the evidential particles, making an attempt to explain their syntagmatic behaviour from general principles. The fifth section describes both the mutual interactions between the two types of evidential elements (affixes and particles), and their interactions with the personal, temporal and modal categories of the finite verb. It will be shown that these interactions make sense semantically in terms of the semantic analysis presented in sections 2 and 3, and so provide independent confirmation for the correctness of this analysis.