It is the purpose of this paper to show that –keyss is an evidential which signals the source of information coded as Inferential evidence. It is often claimed in the literature that –keyss is either a future tense or a modal marker. This paper argues that those two claims are not on the right track since not merely is –keyss compatible with other tenses, but also it, as an epistemic modal, displays a property deviant from T, a reflexive theorem in modal logic. As an alternative treatment of –keyss, this paper proposes that –keyss is an evidential marker on the basis of the observation that there is parallelism between –keyss and evidentials; they take wide scope over negation, and they do not contribute to the proposition in question.
1. Introduction
2. Previous Studies on –keyss
3. Evidentiality and ‐keyss
4. More Evidence Related Syntax and Semantics
5. Closing Remarks