Towards a semasiological account of evidentials: An enunciative approach of -er in Modern Western Armenian

Abstract

Modern Western Armenian has a so-called ‘evidential’ marker, similar to that found in Albanian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, and Turkish. Descriptions of this category usually involve the concept of ‘the source of knowledge’, analyzing the evidential both in discursive terms (second-hand information) and in logical terms (inference, abduction, deduction). A contrastive analysis of Russian corpus data (Bonnot et al., 1997) revealed striking similarities between the semantic values of evidentially marked utterances in Armenian and those of certain Russian utterances which are marked by specific stress patterns. My and Bonnot's study also showed that the admirative value is more central than other pragmatic values, as showed by Baştürk et al. (1996) and DeLancey (1997). In this paper, we analyze a corpus of spontaneous speech to show that the basic value of this so-called evidential marker is, in fact, modal. We describe the particular type of modality involved in enunciative terms, which enables us to account all its pragmatic values, regardless of whether they are ‘typical’ (admirative, inferential, hearsay), ‘marginal’, discursive, or contextual (causal, argumentative, prescriptive, free indirect speech, and so on). Our theoretical claims gain support from intonational phenomena as well as constraints on the utterances' rhematic structure. All in all, we believe such a modal interpretation to be superior to the cognitive interpretation, that centers on ‘the source of knowledge’.