Volume 63, Issue 4 -

This introduction not only browses through the contributions of the whole issue, but also attempts to set the stage for a cross-linguistically unified study of evidentiality markers to be registered in a database. This endeavor has so far been restricted to European languages. We assume evidentiality to be a conceptual domain and, on this basis, want to account for diverse units irrespective of their morphological format and status in the particular language’s grammar. Evidential markers are claimed to be locatable on a lexicon – grammar cline, ranging from distinct lexical units (accessed holistically) to grammatical morphology (having been the subject of traditional descriptions in typology). We highlight different theoretical prerequisites necessary to build a template, pinpoint some shortcomings in recent theorizing and stress the necessity of a neat distinction between an onomasiological and a semasiological perspective: the former ought to delineate the functional values belonging to evidentiality, also examining systematic affinities to neighboring domains, while the latter perspective asks for the structural and distributional parameters of distinct linguistic units that fulfill the basic conceptual requirements and accounts for overlaps with values from contiguous domains. Beside the aims of the database, its present structure is explained and justified. The template designed as an entry for each single unit is illustrated with a pertinent unit from Polish (including an appendix).

This paper deals with the scope properties of evidential meanings. It rejects the idea that different types of evidential meanings have different scope properties. More basically, it rejects the idea that evidential meanings apply to ‘speech acts’ or to ‘states of affairs’. The paper argues that evidential meanings share scope properties in the sense that they are all conceptually dependent on a ‘proposition’ – i.e. a meaning unit which can be said to have a truth value. Subsequently, it outlines how the scope properties can be employed in criteria of membership of the category of evidentiality.

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.

This paper examines a specific verbal paradigm with evidential interpretations in Romanian; it also addresses intriguing questions about compositionality in the evidential domain and the precise delimitation of this notion from other (modal) categories. The discussion is centered on a typical characteristic of evidentials about the past, namely that they are homophonous with the perfect counterfactuals and future perfects. A battery of tests is examined in detail, and it is demonstrated that evidentials are not pragmatic extensions of homophonous forms; they rather have to be considered independent entries in the database.

The evidential meaning traditionally attributed to modal auxiliaries is conveyed in Italian and Greek by complex constructions clustering both modal and aspectual features. The evidential reading of Italian and Greek modal auxiliaries, indeed, is only licenced when the modals take as complements stative, progressive, habitual or resultative subordinates. A feature of aspectual incompleteness of the subordinate is therefore necessary in order to obtain an evidential reading of the auxiliary. This leads us to propose the entire construction combining the auxiliary, the subordinate and the specification of its aspectual values be taken as an entry of the database of evidential units.

This paper sets out a number of reasons for establishing a distinction between sentential (modal) adverbs and modal particles. Adverbs and particles are generally difficult to define as two distinct and independent word classes in terms of unitary criteria and distinctive properties. The traditional role of an adverb is that of modifying a verb or a verb phrase. In reality, adverbs also modify adjectives, sentences, and other adverbs. Particles also serve a sort of ‘modification’ function. Modal particles, for example, take the whole sentence as their object and fit its content to the context of speech. This ‘vague’ similarity, though, should not be interpreted as a motivation for assimilating the two categories, especially when other syntactic properties, such as the sentential position, the distribution, and the sensitivity to sentence types, together with their correlated semantic interpretations, are taken into consideration.

The aim of the article is to analyze relations between the type of use of modal/evidential markers and their syntactic properties (part of speech and linear position). The analysis is based on the uses of the Russian polysemous markers vrode ‘similar’, kak budto (by) ‘as if’, budto (by ) ‘as though’, kažetsja ‘(it) seems’ and poxože ‘similar’. All of them have non-evidential (mainly modal and comparative) and evidential uses. I draw the conclusion that the reportive meaning is more contextually restricted than the inferential one, and that the syntactic position of the marker depends on the degree of contextual dependence of the given reading. Besides that, I conclude that we must postulate two different units of the Database for budto (by), kak budto (by), kažetsja and poxože, but only one unit for vrode.