Abstract

The way linguistic messages are “packaged” in political discourse often reflects evidentially-based criteria and, notably, the intention of the politician to make his epistemic commitment more or less manifest in relation to the type of content proffered to the receiver. The present paper analyzes the evidential function of presupposition and assertion (apud Masia 2017) in a corpus of English, French and Italian political speeches, with the aim of highlighting how these units of information structure are strategically resorted to by politicians to modulate their commitment to more or less challengeable types of content. Data show that more challengeable content types (i. e. attacks and self-praises) are likely to be encoded as presupposition, which reduces the speaker’s commitment to their truth; in contrast, less challengeable content types (i. e. neutral/informative and stance-taking) are more likely to be asserted, with the speaker showing stronger commitment to their truth.

Highlights

  • 1.1 Information source and speaker attitude evidentiality Since Boas’s seminal reports (Boas 1900, 1910) on how the source of information is marked in some languages of the Americas, evidentiality has become the plank of much theoretical and typological research (Chafe/Nichols 1986; Willett 1988; Aikhenvald 2004)

  • In some recent contention (Aikhenvald 2004; Cornillie 2009), the linguistic coding of information source has been characterized as the sole function of evidential markers, distinct from expressions whose function is precisely to signal the speaker’s attitude to information, a meaning typically associated with epistemic modality

  • The purpose of the study was to inquire the evidential function of presupposition and assertion looking at the way they are used in political discourse

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Summary

Introduction

1.1 Information source and speaker attitude evidentiality Since Boas’s seminal reports (Boas 1900, 1910) on how the source of information is marked in some languages of the Americas, evidentiality has become the plank of much theoretical and typological research (Chafe/Nichols 1986; Willett 1988; Aikhenvald 2004). Already in Friedman’s works on Balkan evidentials (Friedman 1986), it emerged that in languages such as Bulgarian, Albanian and Macedonian, evidentiality systems conveyed speaker attitude meanings, hinting at stronger or weaker speaker commitments to the truth of a proposition. Building on this multi-faceted behavior of evidentials in the world’s languages, Chafe/Nichols (1986) put forth a distinction between a “narrow” and a “broad” type of evidentiality, the former marking the source of information proper, the latter the speaker’s attitude to the truth of a proposition.

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