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Article published In: Evidentiality and the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface
Edited by Bert Cornillie and Juana I. Marín-Arrese
[Belgian Journal of Linguistics 29] 2015
► pp. 83–100

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Evidentiality and epistemic modality in the rumor/journalistic conditional in Spanish

Published online: 24 March 2016
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https://doi.org/10.1075/bjl.29.04vat
The aim of this paper is to explore the functions of the so-called rumor / journalistic conditional in Spanish. In order to do this, I will try to account for the fact that rumor conditionals are epistemic as well as evidential whereas conjecture conditionals in Spanish are epistemic but not evidential, as they convey uncertainty and do not encode the source of information. I will claim that the morphological marker -ría is a modal epistemic operator of possibility in both cases. In a rumor conditional, the epistemic operator quantifies over the illocutionary force of an embedded proposition p (enunciation / truth of the information), which means “maybe the information about p is true”. The situation p is anchored in the present or in the future. In a conjecture conditional, the modal epistemic operator quantifies over the realization of an embedded proposition p (fact), which means “maybe the realization of p is true”. The situation p is anchored in the past.
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