Volume 59, Issue 1

This paper discusses evidentials and their behaviour in interrogative sentences, based on novel data from Sm’algyax (Tsimshianic, British Columbia/Alaska). Typically, evidentials in declarative sentences receive a Speaker-anchored orientation (“According to my evidence, p ”), and in interrogative sentences they receive an Addressee-anchored orientation (“According to your evidence, Q ?”). This shift from Speaker to Addressee in questions is referred to as Interrogative Flip, which has been argued to be an obligatory process in canonical questions (Korotkova, Natasha. 2016. Heterogeneity and universality in the evidential domain . UCLA Doctoral dissertation). I discuss a particular evidential sn “Conjectural”, which exhibits variable interrogative flip in questions. The anchor of sn may shift to the Addressee, or it may result in a “Conjectural Question” reading, which I suggest involves a particular orientation of sn to neither the Speaker nor the Addressee. Adopting a simple modal analysis for evidentials, and a pragmatic approach to interrogative flip (Garrett, Edward John. 2001. Evidentiality and assertion in Tibetan . UCLA Doctoral dissertation; Korotkova, Natasha. 2016. Heterogeneity and universality in the evidential domain . UCLA Doctoral dissertation), I suggest that the variable interrogative flip behaviour falls out from the pragmatics of (non-)canonical questions (Farkas, Donka F. 2022. Non-intrusive questions as a special type of non-canonical questions. Journal of Semantics 39(2). 295–337).

This paper accounts for the epistemic use of the conditional in polar questions in French. It is argued that polar questions modalised by the epistemic conditional are biased questions that serve an argumentative function, and that the conditional contributes a different commitment update in interrogatives and in questioning declaratives. The bias type depends on whether the question is interrogative or declarative. In interrogatives, the epistemic conditional is generally associated with the subject clitic-verb inversion pattern. This pattern is argued to routinely convey evidential bias, while evidential bias is determined by the context in est-ce que questions. As biased polar questions in the conditional do not undergo interrogative flip, the conjectural meaning conveyed by the combination of the conditional and questioning is reported to be an evidential extension in keeping with evidentiality in non-flip languages (Bhadra, Diti. 2020. The semantics of evidentials in questions. Journal of Semantics 37. 367–423). This might shed new light on the apparent conceptual puzzle posed by the shift in meaning of the epistemic conditional in assertions and in questions.

This paper investigates the reportative evidential kuulemma and the dubitative muka in Finnish (Finno-Ugric). Kuulemma typically indicates that the speaker reports information provided by someone else (hearsay) and is not committed to the truth of the proposition, while muka (roughly: ‘supposedly, allegedly, as if’) typically signals that the speaker doubts the truth of the proposition, leaving open the information source. This paper explores perspective-shifting and whether these forms can be anchored to someone other than the speaker. I use corpus data and native speaker judgments to test what happens in questions, under the speech verb ‘say,’ and in free indirect discourse. In questions, both forms appear to stay anchored to the speaker (no interrogative flip). However, when embedded under ‘say,’ dubitative muka remains speaker-oriented, whereas reportative kuulemma can shift to the subject. In free indirect discourse, both can shift to the character whose point-of-view is expressed. I propose that these differences are partially related to subjectivity: Whereas kuulemma can be described in objective terms, it has been suggested that muka can express more nuanced affect such as surprise and irony. I suggest this subjective nature of muka is related to its speaker-oriented nature, echoing the speaker-orientation default of affective expressions (e.g. predicates of personal taste, epithets, interjections).

English is generally considered to lack grammaticalized evidential markers (Aikhenvald 2004. Evidentiality . Oxford: Oxford University Press). However, Mélac (2022. The grammaticalization of evidentiality in English. English Language and Linguistics 26(2). 331–359) argues that certain uses of seem and other English verbs have grammaticalized as evidentials. He also offers several other examples of what he calls “(semi-)grammaticalized” evidentials. In this article I provide evidence that English also has grammaticalized evidential strategies in the choice between the present and past tenses when either is possible in a particular context, as well as in the use of certain determiners with proper names referring to specific individuals. The relevant contexts involve representation of particular points of view relating broadly to information source through tense and determiner choices. This analysis supports the work of researchers such as Figueras-Bates and Kotwica (2020. Introduction: Evidentiality, epistemicity and mitigation in Spanish. Corpus Pragmatics 4. 1–9: 13), among others, that evidentiality is best seen as “a discursive-pragmatic phenomenon.”

The paper emphasizes the pragmatic and discursive extensions of a special verbal structure – at its origin, a Future Tense form – known in Romanian linguistics as presumptive mood (hereinafter: PRESUMPT). In terms of evidentiality, the PRESUMPT has two types of meanings: an inferential meaning, expressing an inference-based supposition, and also a reportative meaning, when the utterer does not take responsibility for the truthfulness of information from another source. These significances are very subtle and closely related to their context of use. That is why, sometimes, it is very difficult to distinguish one value from another. Therefore, Romanian PRESUMPT deploys in discourse pragmatic enrichments depending on the syntactic-enunciative structure it is inserted in or on some other parameters, such as: speaker’s epistemic stance, genre of discourse, intersubjectivity, and extends its core meaning of evidentiality through a range of discursive dimensions. Considering this situation, our approach outlines that a complex rhetorical strategy is involved in such contexts, where the PRESUMPT actualizes in fact only its prototypical feature [+placement in a subsequent relation (“ultériorité” – see Bres 2012. Conditionnel et ultériorité dans le passé: De la subjectivité à l’objectivité. In SHS Web of Conferences, Volume 1 (3ème Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française), 1719–1730.)], exclusively marking the relation of subsequence of the hypothesis or of the quoted speech act (in counter-argumentative frames) compared to a previously mentioned state of facts.

This paper discusses the complex interaction between modal particles, verb position and interpretation of causal clauses in German.

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.

This paper develops an account of the Cuzco Quechua reportative evidential. It is proposed that it contributes a preparatory condition in all its uses which states that the evidence holder has reportative evidence that supports the speaker raising the issue denoted by the sentence it occurs in. In declarative sentences, this results in the speech act of presenting the proposition expressed without expressing the speaker’s belief that it is true. In interrogatives, there are two readings. On the interrogative flip reading, the evidence holder is the addressee and the resulting speech act is a question supported by the speaker’s assumption that the addressee has reportative evidence for one of the answers. On the second reading, the evidence holder is the speaker, and the resulting speech act is one of asking the question on behalf of someone else. The account differs from previous accounts of the flipped reading of evidentials in questions which make them part of the answers. It is argued that analyzing the reportative’s contribution as a preparatory condition better captures the insight that the speaker chooses the evidential based on what they know about the addressee’s likely type of evidence at the time of speaking. The paper moreover argues that preparatory conditions cannot be analyzed as presuppositions in the common ground and should instead be understood as propositions the speaker takes for granted, but which may be new information to the addressee.

This paper focuses on the structural and functional properties of a positionally flexible verb-based discourse marker, sai (lit. ‘you know’), which in its turn-final position is a conversational hallmark of the regional variety of Standard Italian spoken in and around Padova, in the north-eastern region of Veneto. Drawing from a series of distributional and scopal constraints (including the interaction with other turn-initial and turn-final verb-based discourse markers, vocative phrases, verum focus, and the negative polarity item mica ), it is claimed that both turn-initial and turn-final sai are best analyzed as intersubjectively-oriented Common Ground management operators (Repp, Sophie. 2013. Common ground management: Modal particles, illocutionary negation and verum. In Daniel Gutzmann & Hans-Martin Gärtner (eds.), Beyond expressives: explorations in use-conditional meaning (Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface 28), 231–274. Leiden & Boston: Brill) activated by Speaker’s salient presuppositional biases of opposite polarity. Syntactically, within Interactional Spine Hypothesis (Wiltschko, Martina. 2021.  The grammar of interactional language . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), it is shown how both turn-initial and turn-final sai are base-generated above the C system, in the specifier position of the lower (Speaker-oriented) field of the so-called GroundP, and then moved up to the specifier position of the higher (Addressee-oriented) GroundP; additionally, the mild-rising intonational contour associated with turn-final sai is claimed to perform a call on the Addressee, which activates the corresponding Resp(onse)P above GroundP. These results contribute to the available literature on the micropragmatic process of construction and negotiation of context-bound evidential meanings, also as a tool to foster manipulative processes.