Evidentiality and the expression of speaker’s stance in Romance languages and German

Abstract

In recent years, the category of evidentiality has also come into use for the description of Romance languages and of German. This has been contingent on a change in its interpretation from a typological category to a semantic-pragmatic category, which allows an application to languages lacking specialised morphemes for the expression of evidentiality. We consider evidentiality to be a structural dimension of grammar, the values of which are expressed by types of constructions that code the source of information which a speaker imparts. If we look at the situation in Romance languages and in German, drawing a boundary between epistemic modality and evidentiality presents problems that are difficult to solve. Adding markers of the source of the speaker's knowledge often limits the degree of responsibility of the speaker for the content of the utterance. Evidential adverbs are a frequently used means of marking the source of the speaker's knowledge. The evidential meaning is generalised to marking any source of knowledge, what can be regarded as a result of a process of pragmaticalisation. The use of certain means which also carry out evidential markings can even contribute to the blurring of the different kinds of evidentiality. German also has modal verbs which in conjunction with the perfect tense of the verb have a predominantly evidential use (sollen and wollen). But even here the evidential marking is not without influence on the modality of the utterance. The Romance languages, however, do not have such specialised verbs for expressing evidentiality in certain contexts. To do this, they mark evidentiality -often context bound -by verb forms such as the conditional and the imperfect tense. This article shall contrast the different architectures used in expressing evidentiality in German and in the Romance languages.

The role of external factors on the reactivation of the heritage language of Turkish-German returnees

“…From a cross-linguistic influence perspective, the category of evidentiality is not available in German, the source of information is marked lexically (Diewald and Smirnova, 2010;Haßler, 2015), and the category of definiteness and specificity, which is involved in direct object marking in Turkish, is similarly available in German grammar (Dodd et al, 2003). Nevertheless, no benefit in the performance of the returnee participants in the domain of direct object marking has been revealed in comparison with the domain of evidentiality.…”

More Than an Information Source: A Bibliometric Review of Evidential Studies (1992–2021)

“…Tantucci (2013) investigated the Chinese 'v-过' structure in the Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese, demonstrated that this structure can be used as evidentials to express specific interpersonal meaning, and proposed the concept of 'interpersonal evidentiality'. Haßler (2015) studied the linguistic and nonverbal resources used to express the speaker's position in Romance languages and German, and Grzech (2021) studied the usage of a discourse marker =mari, attested in Upper Napo Kichwa (Quechuan, Ecuador). Torrent (2015) studied the use of some Spanish idioms and discussed the relationship between semantic pragmatic categories, such as evidentiality, epistemicity and intensification.…”

Stance, Inter/Subjectivity and Identity in Discourse

“…In certain languages such as Turkish or Tibetan, it is an obligatory grammatical category and it is expressed through highly grammaticized morphemes, with specific suffixes for the expression of direct evidentiality (the speaker has witnessed a given state of affairs), hearsay (the speaker has heard about a given state of affairs), or inference (the speaker infers what the given state of affairs might be based on circumstantial evidence or on reasoning). In Romance and Germanic languages, however, evidentiality is an optional category, which can be expressed through a variety of linguistic markers, ranging from lexical means (adverbials, discourse markers) to verbal means (perception and cognition verbs such as 'I think' or 'I guess', modals, verbal morphology such as the conditional in Spanish) (see, among others, Marín-Arrese, 2015;Hassler, 2015;Leclercq 2021, Leclercq & Mélac 2021. In French and in English, some of these markers can also express epistemicity.…”

“…In French and in English, some of these markers can also express epistemicity. In particular, the domain of inference sits at the crossroads between indirect evidentiality and epistemic modality, while permitting the expression of the speakers' stance (Hassler, 2015;Guentchéva, 2018).…”