The many functions of Cuzco Quechua = pas: implications for the semantic map of additivity

Abstract

The additive enclitic = pas of Cuzco Quechua is multifunctional: besides marking additivity it also participates in the marking of concessivity, epistemic possibility and the formation of non-specific indefinite pronouns. This paper provides a description of these functions and proposes that they all involve a presupposition of existential quantification over alternatives. Their differences result from the type of alternatives quantified over, namely focus, epistemic or wh-alternatives. The particular clustering of functions found with = pas has implications for the semantic map of additivity proposed by Forker ( 2016), and presents a counterexample to three implicational universals it encapsulates. Modifications to the map are proposed to accommodate = pas, including connecting it with the semantic map of modality, and recognizing scalar additivity as a subtype of additivity.