Evidential markers in Selkup: Semantic and pragmatic factors in the description of verbal categories.

The paper investigates the evidential system of Northern Selkup dialects. The system is quite peculiar in some aspects: for example, situations percepted visually are marked by the suffix of indirect evidentiality – thus, from a traditional perspective, that means that directly witnessed situations are marked in the same way as not-witnessed. First of all, the functions of all Selkup evidential markers are described in the paper. Than, I argue that the semantic motivation for such a peculiar use of evidential markers does exist.