Epistemic Modalities and Evidentiality in Cross-Linguistic Perspective (Empirical Approaches to Language Typology [ealt], 59)

This volume explores phenomena which come under the heading of epistemic modalities and evidentiality in more or less well-known languages (Germanic, Romance, Balto-Slavic, Hungarian, Tibetan, Lakandon and Yucatec Maya, Arwak-Chibchan Kogi and Ika). It reveals cross-linguistic variations in the structuring of these vast fields of enquiry and clearly demonstrates the relevance and interplay of multiple factors involved in the analysis of these two conceptual domains. Although the contributions present diverging descriptive traditions, they are nonetheless within the broad domain of functional-typological linguistics and give access to distinct yet comparable approaches. They all converge around a number of key issues: modal verbs; the relationship between epistemic modality and evidentiality; the relationship of modal notions with some tense and aspect notions; the notions of (inter)subjectivity, commitment and (dis)engagement; the prosodic variation of modal adverbs, the diachronic connections between negation and evidential markers, the connection with mirativity. The volume is of interest to linguists and advanced graduate students working in general and theoretical linguistics, semantics, pragmatics, cognition, and typology. Contents Editorial Preface List of Contributors Part I: Germanic languages Epistemic modality, Danish modal verbs and the tripartition of utterances Epistemic evaluation in factual contexts in English SHOULD in Conditional Clauses: When Epistemicity Meets Appreciative Modality Part II: Romance languages Epistemic modality and evidentiality in Romance: the Reportive Conditional Epistemic modality and perfect morphology in Spanish and French Anchoring evidential, epistemic and beyond in discourse: alào, vantér and vér in Noirmoutier island (Poitevin-Saintongeais) A prosody account of (inter)subjective modal adverbs in Spanish French expressions of personal opinion: je crois / pense / trouve / estime / considère que p Mirative extensions in Romance: evidential or epistemic? The Italian epistemic future and Russian epistemic markers as linguistic manifestations of conjectural conclusion: a comparative analysis Epistemic modality, evidentiality, quotativity and echoic use Evidentiality, epistemic modality and negation in Lithuanian: revisited Part IV: Non Indo-European languages Two kinds of epistemic modality in Hungarian Epistemic modalities in spoken Tibetan Intersubjectification revisited: a cross-categorical perspective Inference crisscross: Disentangling evidence, stance and (inter)subjectivity in Yucatec Maya Part V: Theoretical perspectives Epistemic modality and evidentiality from an enunciative perspective About Contributors Author Index Subject Index Language Index