Evidential and epistemic strategies in Romanian parliamentary debates

Abstract

The paper presents some evidential and epistemic strategies that appear frequently in old and present-day Romanian parliamentary debates. By evidential and epistemic strategy we mean the manipulation of evidential and epistemic markers, either grammaticalized or pragmatic, in order to achieve various interactional and rhetorical aims. We have in view not only encoded evidential and epistemic meanings, but also (interactional) inferentially conveyed evidential and epistemic meanings. Modality can be manipulated in various ways: the usual ranking of evidentials can be reinterpreted for argumentative means: i.e., hearsay can be sometimes rejected, while, in other cases, it can be presented as more reliable than perceptual evidence.