Evidentiality Revisited: Cognitive grammar, functional and discourse-pragmatic perspectives

327 Pages·2017·1.369 MB·English

by  Juana I. Marín Arrese, Gerda Haßler, Marta Carretero

Evidentiality
Revisited
edited by
Juana Isabel Marín Arrese
Gerda Haßler
Marta Carretero
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Evidentiality Revisited
Pragmatics & Beyond New Series (P&bns)
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University of Augsburg University of Zurich
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Volume 271
Evidentiality Revisited.
Cognitive grammar, functional and discourse-pragmatic perspectives
Edited by Juana Isabel Marín Arrese, Gerda Haßler and Marta Carretero
Evidentiality Revisited
Cognitive grammar, functional
and discourse-pragmatic perspectives
Edited by
Juana Isabel Marín Arrese
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Gerda Haßler
Universität Potsdam
Marta Carretero
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
8
the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
doi 10.1075/pbns.271
Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress:
lccn 2016042018 (print) / 2017006275 (e-book)
isbn 978 90 272 5676 8 (Hb)
isbn 978 90 272 6614 9 (e-book)
© 2017 – John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Company · https://benjamins.com
Table of contents
Introduction
Evidentiality revisited 1
Juana I. Marín Arrese, Gerda Haßler and Marta Carretero
Section A. Evidentiality: Cognitive Grammar and Functional Grammar
Approaches
Chapter 1
Evidentiality in Cognitive Grammar 13
Ronald W. Langacker
Chapter 2
Evidentiality reconsidered 57
Jan Nuyts
Section B. Evidentiality in Grammar and Discourse
Chapter 3
On the evidential use of English adverbials and their equivalents in
Romance languages and Russian: A morpho-syntactic analysis 87
Verónica Böhm, Gerda Haßler and Anja Hennemann
Chapter 4
When feeling is thinking: A lexical-semantic analysis of evidential and
epistemic predicates in Spanish 105
Gijs Mulder
Chapter 5
Seem-type verbs in Dutch and German: Lijken, schijnen & scheinen 123
Tanja Mortelmans
vi Table of contents
Chapter 6
A synchronic and diachronic study of the Dutch Auxiliary “Zou(den)” 149
Ingeborg Harmes
Chapter 7
Potential vs Use: Revisiting an evidential participial construction in
Lithuanian 171
Aurelija Usonienė and Jolanta Šinkūnienė
Section C. Evidentiality and Epistemic Modality in Discourse Domains
and Genres
Chapter 8
Multifunctionality of evidential expressions in discourse domains and
genres: Evidence from cross-linguistic case studies 195
Juana I. Marín Arrese
Chapter 9
Evidential and epistemic stance strategies in scientific communication:
A corpus study of semi-formal and expert publications 225
Laura Hidalgo-Downing
Chapter 10
BE likely to and BE expected to, epistemic modality or evidentiality?
Markers of (non)commitment in newspaper discourse 249
Anne-Laure Besnard
Chapter 11
Markers of evidentiality in Lithuanian newspaper discourse: A corpus-
based study 271
Anna Ruskan
Chapter 12
Exploring evidential uses of the passive of reporting verbs through
corpus analysis 297
Ruth Breeze
Index of expressions 315
Subject index 317
Introduction
Evidentiality revisited
Juana I. Marín Arrese, Gerda Haßler and Marta Carretero
Universidad Complutense de Madrid, University of Potsdam
1. Introduction
This volume on Evidentiality Revisited focuses on semantic-pragmatic based
frameworks for the study of evidentials and evidential strategies and on discourse-
pragmatic studies, with special emphasis on their use as resources for stancetak-
ing in discourse. Stancetaking is a form of social action, involving the expression
of the speaker/writer’s (henceforth speaker) personal attitudes, beliefs, or evalua-
tions concerning events and their commitment with respect to the communicated
proposition (cf. Biber and Finegan 1989; Englebretson 2007). By the expression of
stance DuBois (2007) refers to the various overt forms and strategies of commu-
nication whereby the speaker simultaneously evaluates an object, positions him/
herself or some other subject, and expresses alignment or disalignment with other
subjects. Stancetaking allows the speaker, among other things, to assess realities
and show support or justification for the validity of the utterance, or to distance
themselves and reduce their commitment and/or responsibility for the proposi-
tional content. We hold the position that evidentiality may reflect speaker’s stance,
since the specification of the source and mode of access to knowledge may carry
an indication of the speaker’s attitude and commitment towards the validity of the
communicated information. Since epistemic modality involves speaker position-
ing regarding the epistemic status of events, we understand that this conceptual
domain directly serves the expression of the speaker’s stance. The volume offers
a collection of contributions in which evidentiality and epistemic modality are
closely related to speaker’s epistemic stance, thus aiming for a coherent explana-
tion of this notion.
In recent years, research on evidentiality and on the overlapping of this con-
ceptual domain with the domain of epistemic modality has flourished (Haßler
2010; Carretero and Zamorano-Mansilla 2013; Marín Arrese 2015; Cornillie,
Marín Arrese and Wiemer 2015). Defined narrowly, evidentiality pertains to the
sources of knowledge or evidence whereby the speaker feels entitled to make a fac-
tual claim (Anderson 1986). But evidentiality may also be conceived more broadly
doi 10.1075/pbns.271.01mar
© 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company
2 Juana I. Marín Arrese, Gerda Haßler and Marta Carretero
as both providing epistemic justification and reflecting speaker’s attitude towards
the validity of the communicated information, and hearer’s potential acceptability
of the information, derived from the degree of reliability of the source and mode
of access to the information (Chafe 1986; Mushin 2001; Marín Arrese 2011; Boye
2012). Epistemic modality pertains to speaker’s assessments concerning the epis-
temic status of the event described; that is, the expression of different degrees of
speaker certainty regarding their conception of the reality or likelihood of the oc-
currence of the event (cf. Langacker 1991, 2009). Dendale and Tasmowski (2001:
341–2) note that three kinds of relations between these domains can be found in
the literature: “disjunction (where they are conceptually distinguished from each
other), inclusion (where one is regarded as falling within the semantic scope of the
other), and overlap (where they partly intersect)”. According to the first position,
disjunction, evidentiality is restricted to the identification of the source and mode
of access to the information available to the speaker, and is devoid of any epistemic
judgement (Anderson 1986; De Haan 1999; Aikhenvald 2004). The relation of in-
clusion differs according to which domain is considered the superordinate cat-
egory. For some, evidentiality is regarded as the superordinate category (Matlock
1989); for others, the term modality is used as a hyperonym of both evidentiality
and epistemic modality (Willett 1988; Nuyts 2001). Similarly, Palmer (2001) ar-
gues that evidentiality together with epistemic modality should be subsumed as
two subsystems within the domain of propositional modality. The position that
both domains partly intersect is held by van der Auwera and Plungian (1998), who
note that the interface between the two domains is that of inferential evidentiality
and epistemic necessity. More recently, Boye (2012) has convincingly argued that
both conceptual domains are subcategories of the same superordinate category,
namely a category of epistemicity.
Since the publication of the seminal work on evidentiality (Chafe and Nichols
1986), studies have for the most part centred on those systems of languages where
the grammatical marking of the information source is obligatory (cf. Willett 1988;
Aikhenvald 2004, inter alia). Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in the
study of the domain of evidentiality in European languages, which rely on strategies
along the lexico‐grammatical continuum (Squartini 2008; Diewald and Smirnova
2010; Wiemer 2010). We here assume a broad conception of evidentiality as a “cog-
nitive or functional substance phenomenon” (Boye and Harder 2009:6), expressed
by linguistic means that fulfil the function of indicating the source of information
for the communicated content of a certain proposition. This semantic-functional
understanding is necessary when studying evidentiality in languages which lack
a specific system of grammatical evidentiality (Lampert and Lampert 2010). The
starting point for adducing evidential meanings in a language that does not pos-
sess fully grammaticalized evidentials is to adopt a functional-onomasiological
Introduction. Evidentiality revisited 3
perspective, as has been pointed out by Wiemer (2010). This perspective is coher-
ent with the first two contributions of this volume: Langacker’s cognitive grammar
description and explanation of the domain of evidentiality, and the functional-
cognitive perspective offered by Nuyts.
The papers in this volume for the most part share the corpus-based work-
ing method, which is not only suitable to confirm or disconfirm a hypothesis by
empirical data, but it also provides further insights into a usage-based account
of linguistic reality. Most of the contributions deal with specific discursive do-
mains, genres and text types, such as different types of journalistic texts, or dif-
ferent modes of scientific publications. Among the contributions there are also
cross-linguistic studies on the expression of stance, evidentiality and modality
between various languages (Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Lithuanian,
Portuguese, Russian and Spanish).
2. Overview of the volume
In Section A, the volume includes two theoretically oriented papers on Evidentiality
from the perspectives of Cognitive Grammar and Functional-Cognitive Grammar.
Ronald W. Langacker offers a ground-breaking study on the conceptual domain
of evidentiality and the extent to which evidential markers can be considered
grounding elements, as well as to the relevance to certain theoretical issues in
Cognitive Grammar. Langacker’s contribution discusses issues directly relevant
to the conception of speaker stance, such as the notions of speaker’s striving for
epistemic control in the discourse and speaker’s intersubjective alignment. In
this paper, he argues in favour of a unified account of evidentiality and epistemic
modality, since both evidential and modal systems together involve complemen-
tary strategies of clausal grounding. Epistemic assessment of clausal grounding
concerns the speaker’s conception of the reality status of the profiled occurrence
(an event or situation), while evidentiality provides an indication of the source and
reliability of the information. Langacker argues that both systems co-exist in dif-
ferent languages with various degrees of systemic overlap, and together contribute
to speaker’s epistemic control in discourse.
The other theoretically oriented paper, authored by Jan Nuyts, is a reconsid-
eration of the traditional concepts of modality and evidentiality from a functional
perspective. The paper starts with three preliminaries to the analysis of evidential
expressions: an overview of qualificational categories (the traditional ‘TAM mark-
ers’), a representation of these dimensions in clausal layering, and an analysis of
the modal categories which includes the proposal to add a fourth category, ‘direc-
tivity’, to the traditional epistemic, deontic and dynamic modalities. The modal