Abstract
In this paper evidential and modal adverbs will be studied, such as French apparemment, évidemment, visiblement, Italian apparentemente, evidentemente, ovviamente, and Spanish aparentemente, evidentemente and visiblemente. The development of their signification will be discussed, including German adverbs like offensichtlich. In these means of expression, the functional-semantic categories evidentiality and epistemic modality seem to overlap: on the one hand, they are used if the state of affairs talked about cannot be verified, that is, if there is still a moment of insecurity concerning the transmitted information. Then adverbials with a special structure (preposition + article + nominal form of a verb) will be analysed, and we will examine if they behave in the same way.
Highlights
1 Introduction The aim of this paper is to investigate epistemic and evidential sentence adverbs in Romance languages
The adverbial locutions are often used if the information being talked about comes from an external information source, that is, an information source which cannot be identified as the speaker or author
The functional-semantic categories of evidentiality and epistemic modality seem to overlap: on the one hand, they are used if the state of affairs talked about cannot be verified, that is, if there is still a moment of uncertainty concerning the information transmitted
Summary
The aim of this paper is to investigate epistemic and evidential sentence adverbs in Romance languages. The adverbs were chosen for two reasons: firstly, they denote the visual access to information to different degrees and, secondly, they are used frequently in the three languages For the latter reason we did not pursue the etymologically linked form in Italian and studied ovviamente rather than visiblemente. The semantic-functional understanding of evidentiality is necessary when studying evidentiality in Romance languages, since the starting point for adducing evidential meanings in a language that does not possess real evidentials is the function rather than the form This can be seen, for example, in the Spanish adverb visiblemente ‘apparently’, which in its lexical meaning refers to immediate visibility (9): 9. Using an evidential marker like evidentemente or aparentemente restricts at the same time the speaker’s recourse liability for the content of the utterance That means that they modalise the predication by using evidential adverbs. These adverbial locutions are often used if the information being talked about comes from an external information source, i.e., an information source which cannot be identified as the speaker or author
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