Introduction

Guest editor’s preface

The contributions selected for this Special Issue were presented at the Workshop MODEVIG-14 (Department of Translation and Language Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, 24–25 April 2014), as part of the Research Project ‘Epistemic Modality, Evidentiality and Grammaticality. Inter- and Intralinguistic Contrastive Analysis in Oral and Written Discourse (MODEVIG)’ coordinated by myself (supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación; research grant FFI2011-25755), within the frame of the activities carried out by the Discourse Studies Research Group (GED). The genuine interest of the speakers on the discursive perspective of evidentiality and the high quality of their presentations encouraged me to get in touch with the Discourse Studies journal editor, Teun van Dijk, and propose the publication of a Special Issue on what seems to be a relatively recent approach to this topic. My sincere appreciation goes to him and to the editorial board for having accepted the project. Similarly, I am also very grateful to the external reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions, which have definitely improved the publication.

Goal of this Special Issue and relevance to current research

The literature shows that while some languages compulsorily code the source of information by means of particular morphemes, particles and particular tenses and aspect (Aikhenvald, 2004; De Haan, 1999, 2005; Speas, 2008), others may optionally use certain discourse strategies that involve the presence of epistemic modal markers, phraseologic expressions and metacommunicative comments to make the source of information overt. The languages that do so adopt an interactional discoursal view on evidentiality that takes into account the participants’ intentions, the context of the interaction and the purpose of the exchange. As a discursive construct, the functional coding of evidentiality is manifested through the structural dimension of grammar, the syntactic constructions of the language and its lexical resources. Linguistic elements and constructions with evidential and epistemic values work as anaphoric and cataphoric units that bridge segments and make reference to previous and following stretches of discourse. The discursive approach is therefore interactional and dynamic, paying particular attention to the ongoing process that takes place between addresser and addressee, between speaker and hearer, in the communicative exchange. Thus, in the literature, we progressively find more and more discourse studies that commingle both epistemicity and evidentiality, and talk about the ‘expressive effects’ and ‘interactional force’ of evidentially marked statements (Hanks, 2012), ‘evidential strategies’ (Bednarek, 2006; Cornillie, 2010; Mushin, 2012; Nuckolls and Michael, 2012), ‘discoursal evidential texture’ (Hoye, 2008), ‘legitimation strategies’ (Marín Arrese, 2011) and ‘evidentiality as a discursive construct’ (Fetzer and Oishi, 2014), all of them with a strong emphasis on the socio-cultural and interactional aspects of pragmatic and context-bound evidential phenomena. In most of these studies it is not only the source of information that is tackled, but also the speaker’s attitude about the epistemic status of the information (intersubjectivity and subjectivity, with shared and non-shared access to the information) and about the reliability and validity of the source.

The goal of this Special Issue is to examine evidentiality and epistemicity as discourse strategies that are context-bound and are used by the speakers to encode their attitude and commitment to the information they convey. The approach is therefore pragmatic and functional. Particular attention is given to contrastive empirical studies from different languages. The issue includes seven contributions.

The article by Francisco Alonso-Almeida, ‘The functions of seem and parecer in early medical writing’, studies the function of the verbs seem and parecer with an evidential meaning in early medical writing across a time span of two centuries (1500–1700). The hypothesis held by the author is that the forms seem and parecer are mainly evidential rather than epistemic. In his view, source of knowledge identification and attribution are important in medical prose because writers tend to make manifest that their information is based on demonstrable grounds, including inferential processes. His study allows for cross-cultural and cross-linguistic conclusions in terms of frequency, motivation and use of these evidential verbs in historical texts.

Bert Cornillie and Pedro Gras Manzano’s article, ‘On the interactional dimension of evidentials: The case of the Spanish evidential discourse markers’, examines the grammatical, semantic and interactional properties of four evidential discourse markers in informal and formal spoken Spanish: evidentemente ‘evidently’, por lo visto ‘visibly, seemingly’, al parecer ‘seemingly’ and se ve (que) ‘once sees that, apparently’. From a semantic point of view, the authors study the evidential values expressed by these markers and discuss the correlations between them. From a functional point of view, they analyse the evidential markers on the basis of discourse-interactional criteria such as illocutionary force, position in the turn and kind of turn. From a grammatical point of view, they address the preferences in terms of person and tense/aspect/modality (TAM) experienced by these evidential markers in discourse.

‘From truth-attesting to intensification: The grammaticalization of Spanish la verdad and Catalan la veritat’, by Montserrat González, discusses and illustrates the grammaticalisation process and the polysemic and polyfunctional nature of the Spanish and Catalan markers la verdad and la veritat, from an original objectified referential meaning of the forms (‘tell the truth’, opposite to ‘tell a lie’) to a highly subjectified procedural meaning of the markers (figuratively/metaphorically: ‘frankly/sincerely/honestly’). The author shows that the pragmatic meaning of these markers stems from the loss of semantic features and the different uses that they can adopt in a variety of syntactic and pragmatic contexts, where their (inter)subjective, evaluative and intensifying modal dimensions are fully manifested. In order to account for their polysemic and polyfunctional dimensions, the author proposes salient meanings and prototypical functions.

The article by Gerda Haßler, ‘Evidentiality and the expression of speaker’s stance in Romance languages and German’, contrasts the different architectures used in expressing evidentiality in German and in the Romance languages. It considers the expression of evidentiality in types of constructions that code the source of information in Romance languages and in German, presenting the problems that drawing a boundary between epistemic modality and evidentiality may present. The author sustains that the evidential meaning is generalised to marking any source of knowledge, that can be regarded as a result of a process of pragmaticalisation. German has modal verbs which, in conjunction with the perfect tense of the verb, have a predominantly evidential use (sollen and wollen), whereas the Romance languages do not have such specialised verbs for expressing evidentiality in certain contexts, but mark evidentiality by verb forms such as the conditional and the imperfect tense.

‘Epistemicity and stance: A cross-linguistic study of epistemic stance strategies in journalistic discourse in English and Spanish’, by Juana I. Marín Arrese, explores the use of epistemic stance strategies in journalistic discourse in English and Spanish. The author shows that the linguistic resources of epistemic stance include evidential and modal expressions, as well as verbs of cognitive attitude and expressions of factivity. The article examines the pattern of distribution of epistemic stance expressions in three types of journalistic genres in English and Spanish, and the presence of multifunctionality of some evidential expressions in the two languages. The aim is to reveal possible similarities or differences in the use of the stance resources in the various genres and across languages.

Elisabeth Miche’s article, ‘An analysis of some evidential structures in essays written by students of French as a foreign language’, presents an analysis of three types of constructions taken from essays written by students of French as a foreign language: the shown source, the quoted source and borrowed knowledge. The author defends an evidential reading of these segments given their argumentative function in the students’ discourse, and performs a pragmatic analysis of these language forms that take into account the parameters of the communicative situation and the type of text that the students have to produce. The functional analysis of these three forms has led the author to address the issue of the relationship between evidentiality, reliability and epistemic modality.

The article by Aina Torrent, ‘Evidentiality and lexicalisation in the Spanish phraseological system: A study of the idiom a fe mía (and its variants)’, addresses the relationship between the semantic-pragmatic categories of evidentiality, epistemicity and intensification based on a study of the discursive use of certain Spanish idiomatic phraseological units. The first part offers an introduction to some theoretical aspects, while the second part analyses the usage of the idiom a fe que [in truth/believe me]. The author defends two important theses: (a) evidentiality has played an important role in the process of lexicalisation and grammaticalisation of a number of idiomatic phraseological units and (b) some evidential expressions display the existence of close relationships among evidentiality, epistemicity and intensification.

The seven contributions included in this Special Issue aim to bring in valuable information on the speaker’s expression and coding of evidentiality and epistemicity that is valuable and helpful to researchers working in conversational and discourse analysis, pragmatics and semantics.