Where does evidentiality reside? Notes on (alleged) limiting cases: seem and be like
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Günther Lampert
Abstract
Standard definitions of evidentiality yield unwanted effects for alleged English evidentials: Some (like seem) do not specify an information source at all, but only schematically refer to it, others (like reporting verbs) are, in light of the envisaged cognitive-functional definition, best examples, yet are supposed to be (partially) excluded because of their non-lexicalized meanings. The present meta-study of conceptualizations of evidentiality, a far from trivial issue which must be settled before any database can be compiled, scrutinizes relevant parameters and applies them to two test cases, seem and ‘mediated’ evidentials, suggesting to conceptualize evidentiality as a multi-dimensional contextual category.
© by Akademie Verlag, Mainz, Germany
Articles in the same Issue
- The database of evidential markers in European languages. A bird’s eye view of the conception of the database (the template and problems hidden beneath it)
- Evidence for what? Evidentiality and scope
- Where does evidentiality reside? Notes on (alleged) limiting cases: seem and be like
- How to disambiguate an evidential construct? Taxonomy and compositionality of Romanian verbal complexes with evidential semantics
- What counts as an evidential unit? The case of evidential complex constructions in Italian and Modern Greek
- On the syntactic status of sentential adverbs and modal particles
- Syntactic change and shifts in evidential meanings: four Russian units
Articles in the same Issue
- The database of evidential markers in European languages. A bird’s eye view of the conception of the database (the template and problems hidden beneath it)
- Evidence for what? Evidentiality and scope
- Where does evidentiality reside? Notes on (alleged) limiting cases: seem and be like
- How to disambiguate an evidential construct? Taxonomy and compositionality of Romanian verbal complexes with evidential semantics
- What counts as an evidential unit? The case of evidential complex constructions in Italian and Modern Greek
- On the syntactic status of sentential adverbs and modal particles
- Syntactic change and shifts in evidential meanings: four Russian units
