The Expression of Evidentiality in Spoken and Written Texts: Empirical Approaches to Romance Languages

Abstract

Evidentiality is a grammatical category that encodes information source as its primary meaning. The information can be: acquired through direct perception, reported by others (hearsay) or inferred by the speaker upon considering the information that is available. Languages with an evidential grammatical category have morphemes with a primary evidential value (Aikhenvald 2004). Nevertheless, Romance languages, like many other languages, have a tense- modal system and lack an evidential grammatical category, instead of which several lexical units or certain constructions convey information source. This special issue is devoted to some of those items, such as modal adverbs, evidential meanings developed from tenses such as the conditional, and certain (semi)grammaticalized markers using SAY-verbs and SEE-verbs. These evidential strategies are good examples of the lexical-grammatical continuum (Cornillie 2007b, Squartini 2008, Pietrandrea 2007, Diewald & Smirnova 2010).