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This paper examines the orientation of evidentials in complements of attitude verbs, with Paraguayan Guarani evidential ra’e as a case study. It argues that embedded evidentials can be directed either towards the speaker or towards a matrix attitude-holder argument (e.g., the subject of the attitude verb) and that a syntactic representation of the evidence-acquisition event, with its pronominal subject, in the lower end of the CP field, is well-poised to capture this potential ambiguity. Language-particular properties can also play a determining role in the orientation of the embedded evidential, as is the case of the subordinator ha in Paraguayan Guarani. It is argued that this subordinator requires the presence of a Complementizer specified with a (strong) Modal component (which encodes certainty/commitment on the part of the attitude holder with respect to the embedded proposition) and that this property biases the orientation of ra’e towards the matrix attitude-holder argument. 

This paper examines the orientation of evidentials in complements of attitude verbs, with Paraguayan Guarani evidential ra’e as a case study. It argues that embedded evidentials can be directed either towards the speaker or towards a matrix attitude-holder argument (e.g., the subject of the attitude verb) and that a syntactic representation of the evidence-acquisition event, with its pronominal subject, in the lower end of the CP field, is well-poised to capture this potential ambiguity. Language-particular properties can also play a determining role in the orientation of the embedded evidential, as is the case of the subordinator ha in Paraguayan Guarani. It is argued that this subordinator requires the presence of a Complementizer specified with a (strong) Modal component (which encodes certainty/commitment on the part of the attitude holder with respect to the embedded proposition) and that this property biases the orientation of ra’e towards the matrix attitude-holder argument. 

Paraguayan Guarani does not overtly mark tense in its inflectional system. Prior accounts of languages without obligatory morphological tense have posited a phonologically covert lexical tense, or have introduced tense semantics via a rule, in the post-syntactic interpretative component. We offer a more radical approach: Paraguayan Guarani does not have tense at the level of lexical or logical semantics. We propose that evaluation time shift, a mechanism independently attested in the narrative present in languages with tense, is more widely used in Paraguayan Guarani for encoding temporal meaning. The broader consequence of our proposal is that tense is not a linguistic universal. 

Languages without overt marking of tense have been commonly analyzed as having covert tense, either in the form of a phonologically null tense morpheme or a post-LF semantic rule. We argue that the notion of (neo-Reichenbachian) tense is not only unnecessary for the analysis of Cantonese, but also falls short of accounting for temporal reference in this language. Following Pancheva & Zubizarreta (2020, to appear) on Paraguayan Guarani, we propose an analysis of Cantonese that manipulates the temporal parameter of the evaluation context in lieu of tense. A more general contribution of this line of work is the proposal that tense is not a semantic universal. 

Languages without overt marking of tense have been commonly analyzed as having covert tense, either in the form of a phonologically null tense morpheme or a post-LF semantic rule. We argue that the notion of (neo-Reichenbachian) tense is not only unnecessary for the analysis of Cantonese, but also falls short of accounting for temporal reference in this language. Following Pancheva & Zubizarreta (2020, to appear) on Paraguayan Guarani, we propose an analysis of Cantonese that manipulates the temporal parameter of the evaluation context in lieu of tense. A more general contribution of this line of work is the proposal that tense is not a semantic universal.