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. 101–122
Between evidentiality and epistemic modality
The case of the future and the conditional in European Portuguese
Published online: 24 March 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/bjl.29.05oli
https://doi.org/10.1075/bjl.29.05oli
This paper aims to present an in-depth description of the synthetic and compound
forms of the future and the conditional, as both inferential and reportative
markers, drawing a framework for the respective distribution in Portuguese
journalistic texts. A corpus analysis shows that different categories (evidentiality,
modality, tense, and aspect) contribute to the construction of the values in
question, defining different sets of properties for each of the verbal forms, in
both inferential and reportative uses. Furthermore, it proves that these same
values are particularly sensitive to textual genre: the reportative uses emerge in
news reports, while the inferential uses appear more frequently in opinion texts.
Ultimately, it illustrates how the use of these forms sheds light on the boundary
between epistemic modality and evidentiality, demonstrating that the assertion
of the information source is distinct from the assessment of the speaker’s attitude
toward his/her statement.
Keywords: reportative evidentiality, inference, epistemic modality, conditional, future
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