Abstract
In Romance, epistemic sentence adverbs expressing certainty often reduce the truth value of the proposition. Examples such as Fr. sûrement and Sp. seguramente convey probability and even doubt rather than certainty. This phenomenon, called epistemic mitigation, is the topic of this paper. It will be shown that the intuitive first glance impression of epistemic mitigation masks a bundle of other factors: subjectivization, inferential mitigation, politeness, “better language”, and style. Italian is shown to keep to baseline subjectivization, while French, Portuguese, and Spanish tend to develop further inferential mitigation. The paper presents “ten facts” that explain the interplay of these factors at the levels of function and culture, and in both synchrony and diachrony. The paper thereby proposes a complex synthesis. Further empirical investigation will be required to test the facts and arguments presented.
Highlights
The adjectives in their lexical stem conceptually express “certainty”, Romance equivalents to Engl. surely, certainly, etc., downgrade the truth value of the proposition
If the hypothesis suggested by Lyons and Schneider is correct, the same effect of epistemic mitigation should happen when the simplex It. sicuro ‘sure’ is used instead of the long adverb ending in -mente,2 because both adverbs share the same stem, that is, they convey the same underlying concept of certainty
If we look at the internal distribution of functions realized by long adverbs, we see that sentence and discourse oriented functions prevail over the other functions
Summary
The adjectives in their lexical stem conceptually express “certainty”, Romance equivalents to Engl. surely, certainly, etc., downgrade the truth value of the proposition ( epistemic mitigation). The epistemic adverb expresses that the speaker strongly believes Mary has left: 1. ‘Mary has surely left’ the truth value of the proposition Mary has left is downgraded by the adverb. A spot test in the parallel corpus Linguee (27.09.2016) shows that It. sicuramente is never translated with Fr. sûrement but with certainement or other equivalents (22 tokens) This confirms native speakers of Italian affirming that the truth value of It. sicuramente has not weakened (see above), at least not to the same degree as in French. The translation shows that English produces a similar effect This supports the assumption that epistemic mitigation is a general, possibly universal feature of epistemic adverbs.
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