Lexical vs. grammatical evidentiality in French and Italian

Abstract

This article discusses Romance data corroborating a multifarious account of evidentiality in which dierent dimensions connected to the source of in- formation are distinguished. It will be demonstrated that the diverse distri- butional patterns of lexical items as opposed to grammatical forms in the domains of inferential and reportative evidentiality can hardly be accounted for unless a distinction is made between the source of evidence, intended as the locus where the information is acquired (internal or external source with respect to the speaker), and the mode of knowing, i.e., the process leading to the acquisition of the information (directly visual, indirectly through inferences, reports). 1. The ''evidential vogue'' Since the publication of Franz Boas' work (especially Boas 1938: 133) it has been generally acknowledged that some languages have morpho- logical means for obligatory dedicated expression of the information source specifying how the information has been acquired, e.g., distin- guishing whether it has been directly witnessed (visually, auditorily, etc.) or indirectly known either as reported information or as the result of the speaker's own reasoning (inferences and conjectures). With respect to this or similar consensus definitions Aikhenvald (2003a: 19) recently stigmatized an increasing and ''gratuitous extension'' of evidentiality out- side its proper domain, a reminder of the misuse of ergativity in the past decades. According to Aikhenvald (2003a) the limits of evidentiality have been misconceived, dangerously blurring the distinction between lan- guages where it is obligatorily expressed by dedicated grammatical mor- phemes and languages where it sparsely appears as a secondary mean- ing or a pragmatic extension (''evidentiality strategies'' in Aikhenvald