Évidentialité ou non-prise en charge ? Le cas du conditionnel épistémique en français. Une réanalyse

Abstract

Dans cet article, nous montrons que l’emploi du conditionnel que nous appelons « conditionnel épistémique 1 » (CE1) peut être considéré, de plein droit, par son sémantisme propre, comme un marqueur évidentiel de reprise. Nous montrons que la valeur de non-prise en charge qui lui est souvent associée comme position neutre du locuteur, parfois même comme le trait le plus important de sa signification en langue, n’est qu’une valeur seconde, dérivée, qui découle indirectement de sa valeur de reprise à autrui et qui peut parfaitement être annulée par des éléments du contexte.

How Evidential is the Epistemic Conditional?

“…The position argued for in the present paper is very close to Rossari's. It differs from the one frequently advocated in many recent accounts of the epistemic conditional, notably Dendale (1993Dendale ( , 2018 and Kronning (2012), who claim that the epistemic conditional is an evidential and that secondhand information is part of its semantics. This raises problems that are dealt with below.…”

“…The conditional marks that the speaker disclaims responsibility for the proposition as it is based on information that was still unconfirmed -and therefore uncontrollable-when the announcement was made. There is no consensus on how to label the third meaning, which is variously called journalistic (Gosselin 2001), evidential (Dendale 1993), anaphoric (Azzopardi and Bres 2014), epistemic (Dendale 2018), or uncertainty conditional (Moeschler & Reboul 2001). The secondhand information meaning is reported to be a consequence of the non-commitment meaning by Abouda (2001) while Haillet (2001) highlights the expression of enunciative otherness as a distinctive feature of the epistemic meaning.…”

“…According to Dendale (1993Dendale ( , 2018, the epistemic conditional is characterised by three semantic components: 10 i) it expresses uncertain information, hence its modal meaning; ii) it expresses secondhand information, which accounts for its evidential meaning; iii) it expresses the speaker's non-commitment, hence its alethic meaning. However, Dendale maintains that only secondhand information is a distinguishing feature, the first and the third components being subject to contextual variation.…”

“…Importantly, Dendale (1993Dendale ( , 2018 and Kronning (2002Kronning ( , 2012 highlight the potential of a grammatical marker to establish a link between epistemic modality and indirect access to information. Imagine you live on Avenue Kléber and actually see protesters setting your car alight during a violent demonstration.…”

The Expression of Evidentiality in Spoken and Written Texts: Empirical Approaches to Romance Languages

“…The paper argues for the epistemic modal affiliation to this value. Although the journalistic conditional is typically found in a reportative context, the author proposes that the evidential component is not, according to Aikenhevald (2004) and Rossari (2009), part of its semantics -unlike that which is stated by Dendale (1993Dendale ( , 2018 or Kronning (2012).…”