Th e present study aims at diff erentiating between semantically-coded and pragmaticallyconditioned meaning components of Polish and German sentence adverbs whose meaning is conventionally associated with hearsay (≈ Eng. allegedly, reportedly, supposedly). In the fi rst part, we present a systematic corpus study of hearsay adverbs in Polish and German providing the empirical basis for our analysis and conclusions. In the second part, we provide reasons why our objective should be reached on the basis of Generalized Conversational Implicatures (GCIs), and we show which particular communicative principles distinguished in Neo-Gricean frameworks can sensibly be considered as triggers of GCIs that evoke 'epistemic overtones' in the use of hearsay adverbs. We diff erentiate between GCIs which work for all relevant adverbs and implicatures which only apply to more individual properties of hearsay adverbs on more specifi c levels of their meaning structure. In accordance with this more descriptive task, we discuss general issues concerning presumable hierarchies of factors that infl uence (trigger or cancel) epistemic implicatures in the usage of lexical markers of information source. We argue that many discourse properties on the semantics-pragmatics interface which are characteristic of grammatical evidentials also hold true for lexical markers of information source.
In this paper, the reportive construction sollen+infinitive is treated as merely agnostic, with the negative epistemic component emerging qua conversational implicature. The paper aims to test whether the interrogative sentence type can be seen as a contextual trigger for this implicature. It concludes that the negative epistemic implicature can be triggered or strengthened by proper questions and mirative questions, but not by rhetorical or unresolvable questions as defined by Celle (2018).
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