In this paper we argue that the notions generally grouped together under the heading of evidentiality actually belong to four different evidential subcategories, which are different from one another in terms of their semantic scope. The hierarchical, scopal architecture of Functional Discourse Grammar is used to define these four categories. After giving our arguments for this new classification, we test a number of predictions that follow from it concerning the coexistence of evidential subcategories within a language and the co-occurrence of evidential markers in a single clause. We investigate our predictions in a sample of 64 native languages of Brazil. The data from these languages show that the presence of one or more of the four evidential subcategories can be systematically described in terms of an implicational hierarchy.
This paper analyzes the grammaticalization of modal verbs in Brazilian Portuguese from a synchronic perspective. It takes as its point of departure the hypothesis that grammaticalization is a process in which linguistic elements widen their scope. Since this process is gradual and involves one step at a time, the synchronic correlate of this hypothesis is that if a modal verb has multiple meanings, these meanings should be of contiguous scope types on the grammaticalization scale in their synchronic distribution. The corpus data on which the paper is based show that this prediction is fully confirmed.
This aim of this chapter is to prove the linguistic reality of the distinction between objective and subjective epistemic modality as made in FDG, according to which the former modifies the Episode and the latter the Propositional Content. The chapter studies the two basic Spanish modal auxiliaries poder 'can, may' and deber 'must' and its Portuguese cognates dever and poder in order to see (i) which of the criteria (proposed by Hengeveld (1988) for the lexical expression of this distinction) yield testable criteria for the grammatical expression of epistemic modality and (ii) if the objective-subjective dichotomy somehow relates to the degrees of possibility and necessity expressed by these modal auxiliaries. With respect to (i), it is argued that there are two testable criteria, i.e. non-locatability in time and space and the boundedness to the 'locutionary agent' of propositions, for the identification of subjective auxiliary expressions. As for (ii), it turns out that the expressions of auxiliaries of necessity are prone to express subjective epistemic modality, whereas those of probability and possibility generally express objective epistemic modality.
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