Belgian Journal of Linguistics - Volume 29, Issue 1, 2015

This relevance-based account of commitment borrows from studies on epistemic vigilance and focuses on the hearer’s perspective. It suggests that commitment determines the strength of the contextual assumptions derived from utterance interpretation. In this contribution, I distinguish four kinds of commitment: speaker commitment, communicated commitment, attributed commitment and hearer commitment. The last two kinds of commitment are influenced by three main factors which will be considered in turn: linguistic markers, the hearer’s appraisal of the speaker and the salience of the communicated assumption in his cognitive environment. These claims translate into four experimentally testable predictions. This proposal echoes the current debate concerned with epistemic evaluation of information and aims to account for individuals’ commitment in terms of the relative strength of stored assumptions in their cognitive environment.

Two kinds of meanings are usually associated to the Basque particle bide.1 On the one hand, it has been taken to point to the indirect nature of the speaker’s evidence for the truth of the proposition put forward. According to this view, it would be a sort of inferential particle. On the other hand, bide has been associated to the expression of a certain degree of belief or certainty on the truth of the proposition. This double dimension of bide resembles various aspects of the meaning and use of another Basque particle – omen. The morpho-syntactic behaviour of these two particles is practically identical, and their semantics and pragmatics invite a close comparison. Thus, starting from our conclusions regarding omen, we explore the similarities and differences between both particles. We find two main differences. First, bide encodes a doxastic dimension that is absent from the semantic meaning of omen. And, second, bide can be taken to be an illocutionary force indicator that does not contribute to the proposition expressed, while omen does contribute to the truth-conditions of the utterance.

This paper sets forth a theoretical framework in relation to metarepresentation and evidentiality in Spanish, supported by an empirical analysis of tense/mood contrast expressions. More specifically, we describe how metarepresentational and evidential content are expressed and interpreted in if‐conditional and although-concessive clauses. We also report original experimental data from a written, multiple choice interpretation task in L2 Spanish; and from an L1 task in Spanish with a set of conditional and concessive utterances in which indicative and subjunctive moods alternate. Our global results show that the ability to efficiently integrate linguistic and non‐linguistic cues is particularly costly for non‐native speakers. Yet native speakers also reveal, to a different degree, effects suggestive of processing difficulties related to syntax/discourse interface.

The aim of this paper is to explore the functions of the so-called rumor / journalistic conditional in Spanish. In order to do this, I will try to account for the fact that rumor conditionals are epistemic as well as evidential whereas conjecture conditionals in Spanish are epistemic but not evidential, as they convey uncertainty and do not encode the source of information. I will claim that the morphological marker -ría is a modal epistemic operator of possibility in both cases. In a rumor conditional, the epistemic operator quantifies over the illocutionary force of an embedded proposition p (enunciation / truth of the information), which means “maybe the information about p is true”. The situation p is anchored in the present or in the future. In a conjecture conditional, the modal epistemic operator quantifies over the realization of an embedded proposition p (fact), which means “maybe the realization of p is true”. The situation p is anchored in the past.

This paper aims to present an in-depth description of the synthetic and compound forms of the future and the conditional, as both inferential and reportative markers, drawing a framework for the respective distribution in Portuguese journalistic texts. A corpus analysis shows that different categories (evidentiality, modality, tense, and aspect) contribute to the construction of the values in question, defining different sets of properties for each of the verbal forms, in both inferential and reportative uses. Furthermore, it proves that these same values are particularly sensitive to textual genre: the reportative uses emerge in news reports, while the inferential uses appear more frequently in opinion texts. Ultimately, it illustrates how the use of these forms sheds light on the boundary between epistemic modality and evidentiality, demonstrating that the assertion of the information source is distinct from the assessment of the speaker’s attitude toward his/her statement.

Contrary to Italian and many other languages, German has a linguistic means to mark the speaker’s stance: the so-called modal particles, such as wohl, eben and ja. This paper examines their occurrence in a German novel and their possible translations in its Italian version. It analyses their complex meaning arising from the intertwined relations between speaker – hearer – state of affairs as the three key entities of stance they mark and the textual or situational context, concluding that they have only covert epistemic and evidential features. This cross-linguistic analysis proves that it is impossible not only to translate them, but also to draw a clear borderline between epistemicity and evidentiality.

The topic of this paper is the evolution of the discourse marker comme qui dirait from Old French to Modern French. At the beginning, the marker has the meaning of a hypothetical comparative si comme l’en diroit / comme + qui + diroit meaning comme si l’on disait ‘as if one said’. In a second stage, the marker becomes a reformulative marker with a meaning similar to c’est-à-dire ‘that is to say’. Finally, in a third stage, it becomes a polyphonic mitigation marker. The diachronic study of comme qui dirait explains its contemporary meaning and reveals its semantic features. In addition, a polyphonic analysis will allow us to understand the role of the speaker and of the enunciators in the enunciation of the marker.

The article deals with tip effects between evidential and epistemic components in the meaning potential of evidential markers in Bulgarian, the focus being on sentential adverbs with inferential functions. We justify (and start with) the following assumptions: (i) for any unit we should distinguish its stable semantic meaning from its pragmatic potential which can be favored (or disfavored) by appropriate discourse conditions; (ii) there is a “trade off” between evidential and epistemic meaning components that are related to each other on the basis of mutual or one-sided implicatures; (iii) one-sided implicatures occur with certain hearsay markers whose epistemic implicatures can be captured as Generalized Conversational Implicatures (GCIs). On this basis, we show that (iv) GCIs work also with inferential markers; they can be classified depending on which component (the inferential or the epistemic one) can be downgraded more easily. A crucial factor favoring the inferential meaning is a perceptual basis of the inference. In general, (v) the more complicated the reconstruction of the cognitive (or communicative) basis leading to an inference, the clearer the epistemic function emerges while the evidential function remains in the background, and vice versa. The study is corpus-based and also includes an attempt at classifying micro- and macro-contextual conditions that (dis)favor a highlighting of the evidential function.

Jakobson (1957) bases the analysis of mood on a three-part structure that crucially involves two participant variables. Although the definition of evidentiality in Jakobson (1957) differs in some fundamental ways, it also allows for the explication of a participant structure inherent in evidential meanings. In this paper I argue that by exploring the interaction between these participant structures in multiple-perspective constructions and in reported speech, the framework proposed in Jakobson (1957) enables us to systematically examine phenomena that are typically assumed to arise in evidential expressions as pragmatic effects, particularly ‘commitment effects’ and evidential interpretations of modals. I propose that this approach present us with a principled account of stance meanings (Du Bois 2007), more particularly, of the semantic and pragmatic interaction between modal and evidential meanings, based on their semantic structure.