Chapter 155Narrative Aspect and Evidentiality

155.1 Narration and speech within a story

Narrative tense, aspect, and evidentiality depend partly on whose utterance is being represented. A storyteller introduces events to an audience; a character speaks to another character within those events. The same construction can occur at both levels. Hirosawa illustrates this with a Saru tale about Pananpe and Penanpe, examining ruwe ne as a way of presenting information that the addressee does not yet recognize Hirosawa (2026: 75–78, §6.2).

Later, the sea deity identifies himself to the two men. Here the fourth-person forms refer to the speaking character. This is direct speech inside the tale, whose opening has already established a third-person narrative Hirosawa (2026: 76–77, example 16).

First-person storytelling is widespread, with regional person-marking conventions described in Chapter 150 (Narrative Person and Reported Speech). Neither fourth-person marking nor ruwe ne alone identifies a text as prose, heroic epic, or divine epic.

155.2 Aspect at narrative transitions

Yoshikawa observes that a followed by p, korka, or wa often occurs where the scene, topic, or actor changes. Her examples include a childhood episode followed by ‘now’ and the protagonist's growing up, and an established situation followed by ‘one day’ and a new event. She relates this discourse use to her analysis of a as perfective, separating a completed situation from the current one Yoshikawa (2022: §4.1.1, examples 34–36).

That explanation belongs to a wider disagreement over the form's temporal, aspectual, and modal meaning. The competing accounts are compared in Chapter 111 (A, Rok, and Aan: Earlier Situations and Discovery). A transition in a particular passage therefore supports a discourse observation without requiring all occurrences of the form to have one narrative function.

155.3 Two evidentials and two perspectives

Dal Corso's example 273 contains sekor hawean kor ran hawe as ruwe ne, translated as a crow seeming to come down while speaking. He assigns hawe as to the character's indirect evidence and ruwe ne to the narrator's knowledge of the traditional account. On this reading, the two constructions present complementary sources from different perspectives Dal Corso (2018: 331–332, §8.5, example 273; KAY 24-2,7).

Other combinations receive a different explanation. In example 276, hawe ne nankor ruwe ne accompanies a character's suggestion that a protective deity has secretly informed them. Dal Corso analyzes hawe ne as direct auditory evidence and the final construction as epistemic reinforcement. The passage does not simply report hearsay. He also records reversed orders of direct and indirect forms, so his examples do not establish a single obligatory order for every pair Dal Corso (2018: 332–333, examples 274–276). See Chapter 120 (Formal Nouns and Evidential Constructions) for the underlying constructions and their competing analyses.

155.4 What genre comparisons establish

Dal Corso reports fewer evidential tokens in rhythmic texts than in non-rhythmic texts of equal length in an exploratory comparison. His main study concentrates on prose; its source list also includes epic recited as prose. In the Hokkaido evidential sample, 1,508 of 2,232 tokens are ruwe ne (67.56%). The denominator is evidential tokens, so this figure does not give the percentage of clauses containing the construction or its frequency within each genre Dal Corso (2018: 39–42; 70–72, Table 4).

Hirosawa likewise selects prose partly to avoid the effects of metre Hirosawa (2026: 63). These studies establish uses within identified narratives. A comparison with sung epic or prayer must also consider performance, speaker, dialect, and the proportion of quoted speech. Refrains and metrical material are discussed in Chapter 151 (Sakehe, Refrains, and Verse Structure); prayer endings and person choices in Chapter 154 (Respectful, Ritual, and Avoidance Registers). The Tokachi bare forms studied by Takahashi concern dialect and construction, with no demonstrated restriction to a narrative genre Takahashi (2013: 129–134).