Abstract
This study presents a formal and functional data-driven characterization of sentence adverbs. We define epistemic sentence adverbs as semantic predicates that validate the truth value of their scopes and are macrosyntactically dependent on them. We distinguish epistemic sentence adverbs on the one hand from epistemic complement-taking predicates – i. e., semantic predicates that validate the truth value of their scopes and govern them microsyntactically – and on the other hand from epistemic pragmatic markers – i. e., semantic predicates that validate the truth value of their scopes and that are syntactically independent of them. We also hypothesize that epistemic sentence adverbs have a specific functional role. Unlike (most) epistemic complement taking predicates, they express a non-addressable epistemic evaluation of the scope; unlike pragmatic markers they serve to qualify, rather than negotiate, the epistemic evaluation of the scope. We show that such a distinction is not necessarily inscribed at the lexical level: even though some words invariably behave as sentence adverbs, other words can be classified as epistemic sentence adverbs in some syntactic contexts, and as other epistemic markers in other syntactic contexts.
Highlights
In this article we present the formal and functional data-driven characterization of sentence adverbs that we formalized during the development of the annotation scheme for epistemicity applied to the MoDAL Corpus
The paper is organized as follows: after providing a definition of the functional domain annotated in our corpus, i. e., epistemicity, and a definition of the linguistic units that encode it, i. e. epistemic constructions, we present in section 4 the distributional criteria that we identified to define the morphosyntactic properties of the epistemic markers
We adopted for our work a general constructional approach, which led us to claim that epistemicity is encoded by epistemic constructions, i. e. conventional associations of a form and a function, which can be identified at any level of linguistic structure and complexity
Summary
E. epistemic constructions (section 3), we present in section 4 the distributional criteria that we identified to define the morphosyntactic properties of the epistemic markers These criteria, elaborated within the formal framework of the syntax of spoken language put forward by the Rhapsodie group (Lacheret et al, 2019), allow theoretical room for positing an autonomous class of epistemic sentence adverbs, distinguished, on the one hand, from epistemic CTPs and, on the other hand, from epistemic pragmatic markers.
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