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French expressions of personal opinion: je crois / pense / trouve / estime / considère que p

  • Laurent Gosselin
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Epistemic Modalities and Evidentiality in Cross-Linguistic Perspective
This chapter is in the book Epistemic Modalities and Evidentiality in Cross-Linguistic Perspective

Abstract

French expressions of personal opinion, like je crois que ‘I believe that’, je pense que ‘I think that’, je trouve que ‘I find that’, je considere que ‘I consider that’, j’estime que ‘I reckon that’, have been studied extensively from different points of view: as parentheticals in a syntactic perspective, as metarepresentational prefixes in a pragmatic and cognitive framework, as evidential markers or as epistemic operators in a logical perspective. We examine in this article a particular characteristic of these expressions which concerns the restrictions they impose on the choice of the predicates in the that-clause. The aim of this article is to describe and to explain these restrictions and constraints on the interpretation of utterances containing such expressions of personal opinion, in the framework of the Modular Theory of Modality (Gosselin 2010).

Abstract

French expressions of personal opinion, like je crois que ‘I believe that’, je pense que ‘I think that’, je trouve que ‘I find that’, je considere que ‘I consider that’, j’estime que ‘I reckon that’, have been studied extensively from different points of view: as parentheticals in a syntactic perspective, as metarepresentational prefixes in a pragmatic and cognitive framework, as evidential markers or as epistemic operators in a logical perspective. We examine in this article a particular characteristic of these expressions which concerns the restrictions they impose on the choice of the predicates in the that-clause. The aim of this article is to describe and to explain these restrictions and constraints on the interpretation of utterances containing such expressions of personal opinion, in the framework of the Modular Theory of Modality (Gosselin 2010).

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. Contents v
  3. Editorial Preface vii
  4. List of Contributors ix
  5. Part I: Germanic languages
  6. Epistemic modality, Danish modal verbs and the tripartition of utterances 3
  7. Epistemic evaluation in factual contexts in English 22
  8. SHOULD in Conditional Clauses: When Epistemicity Meets Appreciative Modality 52
  9. Part II: Romance languages
  10. Epistemic modality and evidentiality in Romance: the Reportive Conditional 69
  11. Epistemic modality and perfect morphology in Spanish and French 103
  12. Anchoring evidential, epistemic and beyond in discourse: alào, vantér and vér in Noirmoutier island (Poitevin-Saintongeais) 131
  13. A prosody account of (inter)subjective modal adverbs in Spanish 153
  14. French expressions of personal opinion: je crois / pense / trouve / estime / considère que p 179
  15. Mirative extensions in Romance: evidential or epistemic? 196
  16. The Italian epistemic future and Russian epistemic markers as linguistic manifestations of conjectural conclusion: a comparative analysis 217
  17. Epistemic modality, evidentiality, quotativity and echoic use 242
  18. Evidentiality, epistemic modality and negation in Lithuanian: revisited 259
  19. Part IV: Non Indo-European languages
  20. Two kinds of epistemic modality in Hungarian 281
  21. Epistemic modalities in spoken Tibetan 296
  22. Intersubjectification revisited: a cross-categorical perspective 319
  23. Inference crisscross: Disentangling evidence, stance and (inter)subjectivity in Yucatec Maya 346
  24. Part V: Theoretical perspectives
  25. Epistemic modality and evidentiality from an enunciative perspective 383
  26. About Contributors 403
  27. Author Index 409
  28. Subject Index 414
  29. Language Index 421
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110572261-008

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. Contents v
  3. Editorial Preface vii
  4. List of Contributors ix
  5. Part I: Germanic languages
  6. Epistemic modality, Danish modal verbs and the tripartition of utterances 3
  7. Epistemic evaluation in factual contexts in English 22
  8. SHOULD in Conditional Clauses: When Epistemicity Meets Appreciative Modality 52
  9. Part II: Romance languages
  10. Epistemic modality and evidentiality in Romance: the Reportive Conditional 69
  11. Epistemic modality and perfect morphology in Spanish and French 103
  12. Anchoring evidential, epistemic and beyond in discourse: alào, vantér and vér in Noirmoutier island (Poitevin-Saintongeais) 131
  13. A prosody account of (inter)subjective modal adverbs in Spanish 153
  14. French expressions of personal opinion: je crois / pense / trouve / estime / considère que p 179
  15. Mirative extensions in Romance: evidential or epistemic? 196
  16. The Italian epistemic future and Russian epistemic markers as linguistic manifestations of conjectural conclusion: a comparative analysis 217
  17. Epistemic modality, evidentiality, quotativity and echoic use 242
  18. Evidentiality, epistemic modality and negation in Lithuanian: revisited 259
  19. Part IV: Non Indo-European languages
  20. Two kinds of epistemic modality in Hungarian 281
  21. Epistemic modalities in spoken Tibetan 296
  22. Intersubjectification revisited: a cross-categorical perspective 319
  23. Inference crisscross: Disentangling evidence, stance and (inter)subjectivity in Yucatec Maya 346
  24. Part V: Theoretical perspectives
  25. Epistemic modality and evidentiality from an enunciative perspective 383
  26. About Contributors 403
  27. Author Index 409
  28. Subject Index 414
  29. Language Index 421
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