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This article deals with Spanish modal adverbs and verbs of cognitive attitude (Capelli 2007) and their epistemic and/or evidential use. The article is based upon the hypothesis that the study of the use of these linguistic devices has to be highly context-sensitive, as it is not always (only) the sentence level that has to be looked at if one wants to find out whether a certain adverb or verb of cognitive attitude is used evidentially or epistemically. In this article, therefore, the context is used to determine which meaning aspects of an element are encoded and which are contributed by the context. The data were retrieved from the daily newspaper El País. Nevertheless, the present study is not a quantitative one, but rather a qualitative study. My corpus analysis indicates that it is not possible to differentiate between the linguistic categories of evidentiality and epistemic modality in every case, although it indeed is possible in the vast majority of cases. In verbs of cognitive attitude, evidentiality and epistemic modality seem to be two interwoven categories, while concerning modal adverbs it is usually possible to separate the categories and to distinguish between the different subtypes of evidentiality such as visual evidence, hearsay and inference.
This study is based on an editorial report, which was presented at the 2009 working conference »Alexander von Humboldt and the Hemisphere« at Vanderbilt University (Nashville, TN). It demonstrates the textual genesis of Humboldt’s writings on Cuba through examples, which were obtained from a detailed text comparison of the three existing »original« versions of Humboldt’s Essai politique sur l’île de Cuba. The collation was part of a larger strategy to regain philological ground for the »Humboldt in English« (HiE) project. Since 2007 and funded with grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation, and the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the US-German research team behind HiE has been working on new and unabridged translations and critical editions of three of Humboldt’s most significant texts from his American oeuvre.1 The following observations will outline the most important results of this collation effort as a complementary contribution to the recent release of the HiE project’s first volume, The Political Essay on the Island of Cuba (Chicago University Press 2011), edited by Vera M. Kutzinski and Ottmar Ette.