Evidentiality in Uzbek and Kazakh

3.4 
 The Development of Past Tenses 
The array of past tenses found in Uzbek and Kazakh represents an expansion of those found in 
many other languages in the Eurasian evidentiality belt. In Turkish, the best-studied Turkic 
language within this belt, only two simplex morphemes compete to express past tense: -DI and 
-miş. The simple past -DI, is confirmative (just as its cognates in Uzbek and Kazakh) and -mIş is 
unmarked for confirmativity, which allows it to express any sort of past tense meaning, 
regardless of confirmativity, unless it occurs in combination with some other morpheme that 
contributes confirmative meaning. 
In Uzbek and Kazakh, the participle *–GAn came to supplant the original perfect *-MIš.
Although grammars and some broader works (e.g Johanson 2003) occasionally claim that the 

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participles and past tenses derived from *–MIš are still employed in Uzbek and Kazakh, they are 
very rare. The only remnants of this form are in a few lexicalized items, such as Uzbek kelmish 
‘future’ and Kazakh emis-emis ‘gossip’. In Uzbek, -mish is occasionally found as copular emish, 
where it bears essentially the same evidential meaning as ekan, but with a strong meaning of 
reportedness. The Kazakh cognate *emis has turned into a clitic -mIs, which likewise expresses 
reportedness. In neither language may any cognate of -MIš attach to a bare verb stem. The exact 
uses and meanings of these forms are discussed in the following chapters. 
The addition of the converbial past–(i)b/-(i)p to the past tense paradigm, and its 
association with non-confirmative meaning, has complicated the past tense paradigm by 
introducing a marked non-confirmative simple (i.e. non-copular) past term. Whereas -mIş in 
Turkish may be employed in non-confirmative contexts, in Uzbek and Kazakh, the converbial 
past usually takes precedence over the perfect with regard to non-confirmativity, and the perfect 
-GAn is only employed once the non-confirmativity of the context has been established. 
The precedence of the converbial past in non-confirmative contexts is illustrative of the 
competition between the meanings borne by the past tenses. C
ONFIRMATIVITY
is the most 
marked meaning, and past tenses marked as confirmative or non-confirmative take precedence 
when those meanings are expressed. D
EFINITENESS
is the next most highly ranked meaning, and, 
in Uzbek, when appropriate, temporal 
DISTANCE
may be employed when distinguishing events 
marked by the past or the perfect. The ranking of the prominence of these meanings may be 
summarized as: 
C
ONFIRMATIVITY 
>
D
EFINITENESS 
>
(D
ISTANCE
) 
When in copular past is present, its confirmative meaning overrides any competing meaning 
borne by the non-finite inflections that it occurs with. Likewise, the marked non-confirmative 

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meaning borne by the copular form of the perfect (Uz: ekan, Kaz: eken) overrides any competing 
meaning marked on lower parts of the predicate. The evidential properties of ekan/eken are the 
topic of Chapter 4.

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