Spanish inferential and mirative futures and conditionals: An evidential gradable modal proposal

Abstract

Spanish future and conditional morphemes may display inferential readings: Elena ganaría la carrera ayer, as in ‘Helen must have won the race yesterday’, a present deduction about a past event. They may also display readings known as concessive, dubbed ‘mirative’ here: Elena ganaría la carrera ayer, pero no está contenta ‘Helen might have won the race yesterday, but she is not satisfied’. The proposal is that such futures and conditional affixes encode an evidential modal involving a body of indirect information, which the speaker may vouch for or not. This modal contributes to propositional content and can be syntactically and semantically embedded, so is not an illocutionary marker. It is a degree expression that does not reduce to necessity or possibility, so is reminiscent of gradable adjectives such as tall or probable. It displays the flexible anchoring characteristics of predicates of personal taste such as tasty, so may partially differ from canonical epistemic modals. Ordering sources and anchoring behavior combine in such a modal to trigger various levels of confidence in the information, resulting in variability in force, which may range from certainty/necessity to doubt/possibility in both inferentials and miratives.