Evidential Meaning Research Articles

The evidential dimension of implicitly conveyed disagreement in political debates

Abstract The idea that manipulation relies more heavily on implicit than on explicit communication has been the plank of several earlier and recent debates on argumentation and speaker roles in interactions. The present contribution will inquire into the selective nature of the use of implicit communication in political discourse; notably, analyzing the distribution of presuppositions and implicatures in two political debates, it will be argued that the use of these two implicit communicative devices – and, particularly, that of presupposition – is likely to correlate with the expression of disagreement, notably through aggressive and blasting contents, more often than with other content types. This tendency will be accounted for by considering the evidential meaning presuppositions and implicatures add to an utterance, which contributes to modulating both speaker’s commitment to truth and source identification on the part of the receiver. Data also show that, when face-threatening contents are exchanged, presuppositions epitomize by far the most preferred strategy in both debates.

Machine translation: Turkish–English bilingual speakers’ accuracy detection of evidentiality and preference of MT

Machine translation (MT) is the automated process of translating text between different languages, encompassing a wide range of language pairs. This study focuses on non-professional bilingual speakers of Turkish and English, aiming to assess their ability to discern accuracy in machine translations and their preferences regarding MT. A particular emphasis is placed on the linguistically subtle yet semantically meaningful concept of evidentiality. In this experimental investigation, 36 Turkish–English bilinguals, comprising both early and late bilinguals, were presented with simple declarative sentences. These sentences varied in their evidential meaning, distinguishing between firsthand and non-firsthand evidence. The participants were then provided with MT of these sentences in both translation directions (Turkish to English and English to Turkish) and asked to identify the accuracy of these translations. Additionally, participants were queried about their preference for MT in four crucial domains: medical, legal, academic, and daily contexts. The findings of this study indicated that late bilinguals exhibited a superior ability to detect translation accuracy, particularly in the case of firsthand evidence translations, compared to their early bilingual counterparts. Concerning the preference for MT, age of acquisition and the accuracy detection of non-firsthand sentence translations emerged as significant predictors.

Grammatical and Lexical Dialectal Variation in Spanish: The Case of deísmo

Deísmo is a non-standard dialectal phenomenon consisting of the insertion of a non-required preposition de ‘of’ before a non-finite clause: Me apetece (de) salir ‘I want to go out’. In most papers, de is analyzed as a defective complementizer that does not change the meaning of the sentence. However, deísmo has also been associated with a prospective meaning with some verbs, and de has been considered as a marker of evidentiality with visual perception verbs. In this paper, we provide a formal analysis for deísmo constructions, in which de is located in a projection below that occupied by de in dequeísmo constructions). Secondly, we will show the results of a questionnaire whose objective is to figure out if there is an evidential meaning associated with deísmo. For the questionnaire, we made a preliminary search in Corpus Oral y Sonoro del Español Rural (COSER) and in Spanish Web Corpus 2018 (Sketch Engine). From this, we selected the most frequent verbs with deísmo in Castilla-La Mancha (Spain). An examination of the results revealed that, on the one hand, deísmo is lexically associated with certain verbs, but not necessarily with all of the same semantic class; and on the other hand, that there is not an evidential meaning associated with deísmo.

The evidential meaning of presupposition and implicature between retractability and deniability of information

Abstract The relation evidentiality bears on the coding of some information as presupposition or as implicature is still an underexplored research field. In this paper, such an interplay is addressed by looking into how presupposed and implied contents (differently) respond to contexts of challenge and deniability. As taken for granted information (Stalnaker, Robert. 1973. Presuppositions. Journal of Philosophical Logic 2(4). 447–457), presupposition is more resistant to both challenging and retracting conversational moves, since it conveys content the speaker does not commit to. By contrast, implicature – characterized as intentional meaning (Grice, Herbert P. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Peter Cole & Jerry Morgan (eds.), Syntax and semantics 3: Speech acts, 41–58. New York: Academic Press) – allows both challenging and retracting conversational moves, because it is information the speaker commits to the most, similarly to what happens with plain declarative sentences. Building on this account, it is suggested that the higher challenging and deniability status cued by implicature is related to its function of encoding a direct type of evidentiality (Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2004. Evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press), namely a condition in which the speaker presents herself as the first-hand source of some information. Conversely, the weaker challengeability and deniability associated to presupposition hinges on its property of encoding a mutual type of evidentiality (Hintz, Daniel J. & Hintz Diane M. 2017. The evidential category of mutual knowledge in Quechua. Lingua 186. 88–109), that is, a state in which information is construed and conveyed as already shared by all participants at the moment of utterance.

Assessing the inferential strength of epistemic must

Abstract: This article presents four experiments that investigate the meaning of English and Italian statements containing the epistemic necessity auxiliary verb must/dovere , a topic of long-standing debate in the philosophical and linguistics literature. Our findings show that the endorsement of such statements in a given scenario depends on the participants’ subjective assessment about whether they are convinced that the conclusion suggested by the scenario is true, independently from their objective assessment of the conclusion’s likelihood. We interpret these findings as suggesting that English and Italian speakers use epistemic necessity verbs to communicate neither conclusions judged to be necessary (contrary to the prediction of the standard modal logical view) nor conclusions judged to be highly probable (contrary to the prediction of recent analyses using probabilistic models) but conclusions whose truth they believe in (as predicted by the analysis of epistemic must as an inferential evidential). We suggest that this evidential meaning of epistemic must/dovere might have arisen in everyday conversation from a reiterated hyperbolic use of the words with their original meaning as epistemic necessity verbs.

Assessing the inferential strength of epistemic must

This article presents four experiments that investigate the meaning of English and Italian statements containing the epistemic necessity auxiliary verb must/dovere , a topic of long-standing debate in the philosophical and linguistics literature. Our findings show that the endorsement of such statements in a given scenario depends on the participants’ subjective assessment about whether they are convinced that the conclusion suggested by the scenario is true, independently from their objective assessment of the conclusion’s likelihood. We interpret these findings as suggesting that English and Italian speakers use epistemic necessity verbs to communicate neither conclusions judged to be necessary (contrary to the prediction of the standard modal logical view) nor conclusions judged to be highly probable (contrary to the prediction of recent analyses using probabilistic models) but conclusions whose truth they believe in (as predicted by the analysis of epistemic must as an inferential evidential). We suggest that this evidential meaning of epistemic must/dovere might have arisen in everyday conversation from a reiterated hyperbolic use of the words with their original meaning as epistemic necessity verbs.

Seeing is believing

Abstract Verbs of perception are known for their prolific use in various non-literal functions that are usually argued to have developed from their denotational semantics (San Roque, Kendrick, Norcliffe & Majid 2018). In this study we document interactional practices involving the Estonian 2nd person verb form näed ’you see’ to demonstrate that its usage is anchored in face-to-face situations where the speaker guides a co-present other’s visual attention. Through multimodal analysis we show how näed is coordinated with the participants’ body orientations, gestures, and gazes to point to visually available proof for one’s current arguments, rendering it an evidential meaning even in its most “literal” uses of seeing, when a co-participant is invited to consider the visual evidence. We argue that the spatially anchored uses constitute a natural habitat of verbs of seeing, as visual perception is a mutually calibrated interactional accomplishment. Relevant syntactic constructions emerge in real time conversation where näed, calling for a visual orientation, is either preceded or followed by clausal specifications of what is to be seen, which makes it look like a particle. This challenges the argument that perception verbs start out as syntactic predicates in full clauses to then develop other uses.

Evidentiality in the Age of Multimodal Communication: a Linguosynergetic Analysis of Mass Media Texts

In modern mass media texts, the modus category of evidentiality plays a crucial role in conveying the author’s message and shaping the reader’s perception of the information presented. The use of multimodal means, including nonverbal components of communication, visual modus, and hyperlinks, intensifies and expands evidential semantics, influencing the reader’s judgment of the relevance, reliability, and truthfulness of the information and its source. This study employs linguosynergetic analysis and a range of quantitative, functional-semantic, and contextual-situational methods to investigate how multimodal means contribute to the expression of various shades of evidential meaning, such as reflections, doubts, confidence, statements, and citations. The research material includes discursive contexts from advanced informational, scientific, general research, and practical-analytical articles, as well as definitions from electronic versions of dictionaries of the modern English language. The results suggest that multimodal means serve as valuable additional resources for updating evidential semantics, highlighting the possibility of combining them with various linguistic indicators of the category of evidentiality to achieve the author’s communicative intentions. The article sheds light on the intricacies of evidentiality in mass media discourse and provides insights into the role of multimodal means in conveying meaning beyond words.

— Yiqtol as Evidential Strategy in Biblical Hebrew

Abstract The goal of this study is to argue that the — yiqtol construction has an evidential meaning when employed with reference to the past. The yiqtol functions in these situations as an evidential strategy and is used to express the source of information. For instance, Exod. 15:1, which famously begins with , should be understood as ‘then (as reported / as they say) Moses sang’. The words added between brackets refer to the source of information. In most biblical passages where this rare and puzzling construction is attested the evidential yiqtol appears with deictic markers that tie the world of the narrative to that of the authors and of the audience. Interestingly, paratextual elements and redactional observations support the idea that we are dealing with evidential strategies. Finally, the Hebrew Bible seems to contain additional instances of the evidential yiqtol in a similar construction ( — yiqtol).

Seem and Appear and Their Norwegian Verbal Counterparts: A Cross-Register Contrastive Study

ABSTRACT Verbs such as seem and appear combine features of evidential meaning with epistemic modality. This study takes a corpus-based, contrastive view of such verbs in Norwegian and English. It investigates the frequencies, patterns and meanings of seem, appear and their Norwegian correspondences virke, synes and se ut in English fiction and academic prose. Both similarities and differences are found across languages and registers. Appear and synes are clearly more frequent in academic prose and can therefore be characterised as more formal. Of all the verbs investigated, seem has the greatest syntactic flexibility. The Norwegian verbs show more syntactic variation across lexemes than the English verbs do. The English verbs are arguably more grammaticalised in their evidential meanings: they occur more regularly with catenative function, and are also complemented directly by NPs and nominal clauses rather than by PPs and adverbial clauses, which is often the pattern of the Norwegian verbs.

한국어 ‘-길래’ 접속문의 통사의미적 합성

In this paper, I make a formal semantic description of Korean conjunctive sentences which are headed by connective ending ‘-killay’. Through a critique of the previous formal semantic analysis of ‘-killay’ by Yeom(2012), I argue that ‘-killay’ has a direct evidential meaning which is interpreted as a kind of epistemic modal meaning, every type of ‘-killay’ conjunctive sentences has presuppositions that the consequent proposition is true and the consequent situation is stage-level, and the time of acquiring direct evidence about the antecedent situation precedes the time of the consequent situation which in turn precedes or overlaps the utterance time. The lexical semantic definition containing all these properties of ‘-killay’ is shown to make complete the semantic composition procedures of ‘-killay’ conjunctive sentences. (Yonsei University).

Affordances of physical objects as a material mode of representation: A social semiotics perspective of hands-on meaning-making

ABSTRACT This paper examines the affordances of physical objects (e.g. apparatus, models, manipulatives) as they were used by teachers and students to make meaning in coordination with their speech and gestures. Despite the pervasive use of physical objects as material and tactile resources in hands-on investigations or demonstrations, there have been few attempts to analyze their role and function in meaning-making, in the same way, that researchers have previously done for other modes of representation such as speech, written text, diagram and gesture. Using social semiotics as a theoretical framework, we conceptualise physical objects as a semiotic mode with a particular affordance for making meaning that involves embodied actions and manipulation of tools. Based on a multimodal discourse analysis of numerous classroom situations, we illustrate how physical objects as a mode have four unique affordances for meaning-making in science classrooms. These affordances are: (a) enacting material interaction, (b) providing evidential meaning, (c) orientating three-dimensional spatial meaning and (d) sensitising experiential meaning. The implication of why we should use physical objects to support or value-add science meaning-making is then discussed.

Inner speech markers in Russian and Serbian

In this paper, we address one part of the research related to the phenomenon of someone else?s speech, which concerns the marking of inner (unspoken) speech in Russian and Serbian. We point out the means (parenthetical verbs and particlexenomarkers) by which the inner speech is marked. The paper pays special attention to the use of the word rekoh/reko? and kao/ ko velim in the Serbian language as a marker of inner speech. On the other hand, a component of inferential evidential meaning in the given markers can be identified.

The Boundaries between Perception and Evidentiality. Dialectal and Diachronic variation in "se ve que"

The sequence se ve que can convey various meanings: indirect physical perception, cognitive perception and evidentiality. The latter value, however, is restricted to European Spanish, and is especially frequent in the Eastern Area. From a diatopic perspective, the existence of ambiguous uses of se ve que can be acknowledged where speakers can interpret both a perceptual and an evidential meaning of the structure. Thanks to a diachronic study and to the analysis of ambiguous vs. non-ambiguous uses, this article postulates further recognition criteria that help distinguish between perceptual and evidential meanings of se ve que . In this sense, the study shows that the trait shared by perceptual and evidential values —and the one leading to ambiguity— is the fact that they are based on one and the same reasoning process, and the difference between them —that may help distinguish them— lies in the part of the reasoning process that is being cognitively focused. Likewise, the article shows how a deeper study of se ve que can contribute to a better understanding of evidentiality in Spanish.

The Boundaries between Perception and Evidentiality. Dialectal and Diachronic Variation "se ve que"

The sequence se ve que can convey various meanings: indirect physical perception, cognitive perception and evidentiality. The latter value, however, is restricted to European Spanish, and is especially frequent in the Eastern Area. From a diatopic perspective, the existence of ambiguous uses of se ve que can be acknowledged where speakers can interpret both a perceptual and an evidential meaning of the structure. Thanks to a diachronic study and to the analysis of ambiguous vs. non-ambiguous uses, this article postulates further recognition criteria that help distinguish between perceptual and evidential meanings of se ve que. In this sense, the study shows that the trait shared by perceptual and evidential values —and the one leading to ambiguity— is the fact that they are based on one and the same reasoning process, and the difference between them —that may help distinguish them— lies in the part of the reasoning process that is being cognitively focused. Likewise, the article shows how a deeper study of se ve que can contribute to a better understanding of evidentiality in Spanish.

Logical Encoding of Argumentation Frameworks with Higher-order Attacks and Evidential Supports

We propose a logical encoding of argumentation frameworks with higher-order interactions (i.e. attacks/supports whose targets are arguments or other attacks/supports) with an evidential meaning for supports. Our purpose is to separate the logical expression of the meaning of an attack or an evidential support (simple or higher-order) from the logical expression of acceptability semantics. We consider semantics which specify the conditions under which the arguments (resp. the attacks/supports) are considered as accepted, directly on the extended framework, without translating the original framework into a Dung’s argumentation framework. We characterize the output of a given framework in logical terms (namely as particular models of a logical theory). Our proposal applies to the particular case of Dung’s frameworks, enabling to recover standard extensions.

Особенности указания на источники информации в немецкоязычном арктическом медиадискурсе

The research objective includes analysing information sources in the German-language media discourse on the Arctic region ecological problems. The article considers realization of the evidentiality category, examines functions of quotations and classifies information sources. Scientific originality of the study involves describing the means of information sources representation in this type of discourse. The findings indicate that the statements possessing the evidential meaning “quotation” or containing indirect quotation are among the most frequent means of an information source representation. Particular researchers and experts often come out as information sources.

Evidential meaning and (not-)at-issueness

Recent years have seen a lot of research on evidentiality within formal semantics and pragmatics. The near-consensus in the literature is that the type of evidence signalled by the evidential marker, which I will refer to as the Evidential Requirement (ER), is not asserted and should be analyzed as a conventional trigger of Not-At-Issue (NAI) content. By scrutinizing empirical diagnostics previously used to support the ER-as-NAI view, the paper aims at disentangling how different notions of (not-)at-issueness can be applied to evidentiality, and develops objections to the idea that evidentials always conventionally encode NAI content. BibTeX info

Evidentiality in adverbs of manner of perceivability

AbstractThis paper presents an analysis of the expression of evidentiality by the English adverbsmanifestly, noticeably, patentlyandvisibly(MNP&V). I propose that the adverbs have a meaning of manner and an evidential meaning, and that both meanings often coexist, in which case evidentiality is shown to be a pragmatic implication of the meaning of manner. An account is provided of the factors of the linguistic context that trigger MNP&V’s evidential meaning, as a single meaning or as an implication: propositional scope, realis assertion, no premodification by degree adverbs mapping on to a construal of totality and no coordination with adverbs of manner. Position is also shown to strengthen or weaken the evidential implication when MNP&V have syntactic clausal scope. The evidentiality expressed by MNP&V is also characterised according to mode of access, domain, subjectivity and reliability. The adverbs have been submitted to a quantitative analysis of all their occurrences in the British National Corpus; the results show that MNP&V are evidential by implication in most cases, and also uncover individual differences in features such as position and domain of evidence and in the extent to which each adverb can be considered as an evidential expression.

Evidential strategies in receiver-directed talk: The case of English inferential adverbs

The aim of this paper is to examine the types of evidential meaning expressed by clearly and obviously in receiver-directed talk, and to identify their interpersonal functions. It focuses on their uses in utterances containing the second person pronoun subject, excerpted from the British National Corpus. This study demonstrates that clearly and obviously are used to express inference, conjecture, assumption and self-evidence. The four notions can be organised on a cline, each showing a different degree of (inter)subjectivity, which is why this study argues that (inter)subjectification is responsible not only for their development from adverbs of manner into evidential adverbs (which is generally agreed on), but also for the different types of evidential meaning they express. It also argues that self-evidence is a post-evidential meaning of the two adverbs. This paper demonstrates that inferences, conjectures and assumptions function as strategies for eliciting a response from the addressee. Inferences and assumptions serve as prompts; conjectures have a challenging function. Inferences are also used to provide justification for the speech act performed by the speaker, while assumptions prepare the ground for the speaker's talk. Self-evidence is connected with the interpersonal functionality of concurrence and with textual functions performed by the two adverbs.