Introduction

Chapters in this book

1. Prelim pages i
2. Table of contents vii
3. Preface ix
4. Introduction 1
5. Certainty
6. Certainty 29
7. Modes of modality in an Un-Cartesian framework 47
8. (Un)Certainty as attitudinality
9. Counter-argumentation and modality 65
10. Explanation as a certainty marker in persuasive dialogue 83
11. How to deal with attitude strength in debating situations. A survey on forewarning, argument strength, repetition, and source credibility as mediators of uncertainty 97
12. The role of subjective certainty in the epistemology of testimony 121
13. Uncertainty in polar questions and certainty in answers? 135
14. Lying as a scalar phenomenon 153
15. Persuasion pragmatic strategies in L1/L2 Italian argument-ative speech 175
16. Dialogical exchange and speech acts
17. What do I know as yet? 185
18. On polar questions, negation, and the syntactic encoding of epistemicity 199
19. Epistemic uncertainty and the syntax of speech acts 217
20. Discursive functions of evidentials and epistemic modals 239
21. Onomasiology
22. Vagueness, unspecificity, and approximation. Cognitive and lexical aspects in English, Swedish, and Italian 265
23. Latin commitment-markers 285
24. Italian come se “as if” 297
25. Applications in exegesis and religious discourse
26. The communication of certainty/uncertainty within a Gospel passage (John 9:1-41) 327
27. Rhetorics of (un)certainty in religious discourse 343
28. Subject index 363