An approach to Catalan evidentiality

Abstract

Evidential expressions are generally treated in the literature as a type of epistemic modality. The speaker estimates the chances that an utterance has of being true and expresses his / her strength of commitment to the truth of the proposition expressed. Strictly speaking, the evidential marking involves the speaker’s or writer’s stance in relation to the source-of-information, whereas epistemic modals express the speaker’s or writer’s attitude regarding the reliability of the information as well as the commitment to the truth of the message. In both cases, there is an extended use of lexical and auxiliary modal verbs, adverbials, and epistemic modifiers (Givón 1982; Anderson 1986; Chafe 1986; Mithun 1986; Mayer 1990). This article approaches the Catalan evidential system in its broadest sense, taking both evidentiality marking and epistemic modality into consideration, and presents Catalan linguistic expressions of attitudes toward knowledge in general (Chafe 1986; Willet 1988). The first section deals with the issue of subjectivity, in relation to speaker’s stance toward knowledge; the second section is devoted to the epistemic value of specific Catalan evidential expressions, following Chafe’s classification. Since this is not a quantitative study, the examples provided aim to illustrate this semantic sub-field in Catalan, a minority language.