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Institute
Language contact and the linguistic coding of evidentiality in varieties of Spanish in Latin America
(2022)
This book is concerned with the diachronic development of selected topic and focus markers in Spanish, Portuguese and French. On the one hand, it focuses on the development of these structures from their relational meaning to their topic-/ focus-marking meaning, and on the other hand, it is concerned with their current form und use. Thus, Romance topic and focus markers – such as sp. en cuanto a, pt. a propósito de, fr. au niveau de or sentence-initial sp. Lo que as well as clefts and pseudo-clefts – are investigated from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. The author argues that topic markers have procedural meaning and that their function is bound to their syntactic position. An important contribution of this study is the fact that real linguistic evidence (in the form of data from various corpora) is analyzed instead of operating with constructed examples.
This paper is concerned with constructions that express probability and their interaction with the indicative and subjunctive mood, as well as with other contextual elements. In detail, the paper deals with the constructions [sin duda + indicative/subjunctive], [tal vez + indicative/subjunctive], [probablemente + indicative/subjunctive] and [posiblemente + indicative/subjunctive]. In their interaction with mood, the constructions are understood as different microconstructions. For example, [sin duda + indicative] and [sin duda + subjunctive] are seen as different microconstructions of the superordinate
mesoconstruction [modal construction (of probability) + verb]. In a qualitative analysis examples from the CREA, CORPES XXI, and CdE corpora are examined regarding the interaction of [expression of probability] + [mood]. Following the Principle of No Synonymy of Grammatical Forms, the analysis confirms that the use of mood additionally influences the expressed degree of probability of the constructions. For instance, while probablemente generally expresses a slightly higher probability than posiblemente, a fine-tuned analysis
shows that the expressed degrees of probability of [probablemente + subjunctive] and [posiblemente + indicative] are highly similar. This is also often confirmed by further contextual information. In summary, the paper shows that Cognitive Construction Grammar is
a very suitable background against which to investigate modal phenomena, as cognitive approaches generally deal with the ways in which language users conceptualize the world from their own point of view, and as expressions of modality, more precisely, probability,
are also closely related to speakers’ attitudes or perspectives.
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 Pais. 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.