Experience, certainty and control, and the direct evidential in Wanka Quechua questions

Evidentiality is traditionally discussed in terms of information source and its relation to the degree of commitment a speaker has with respect to a proposition. Furthermore, it is a notion that is usually thought to apply principally to assertions. A consideration of the full range of uses of the Wanka Quechua direct evidential shows that while these concepts are generally sufficient for the description of prototypical usage, understanding other uses requires explanation along different lines. Certain non-prototypical uses exemplify a type of subjectification, a process of semantic change that has been observed cross-linguistically (cf. Traugott 1989, Langacker 1990). The use of the direct evidential as a grammaticalized marker of content (WH) questions is particularly anomalous from a traditional perspective. However, it can be shown to be a well-motivated extension from other uses within the semantic network.