Evidentiality and the Semantics Pragmatics Interface

Coming to grips with the semantics-pragmatics interface of evidentiality is an important step forward towards a comprehensive lexicography of this functional category. It not only allows for differentiating between encoded evidential meanings and contextually inferred pragmatic meanings, but also improves the empirical basis for cross-linguistic comparability. A clear view of the conventional meaning of evidential markers, and its relation to inferred pragmatic meaning, gives new insights in degrees of conventionalization across languages. In this volume, the researcher interested in evidentiality and epistemic modality finds accounts of evidentials with epistemic overtones as well as analyses of the influence of contextual factors such as genre or speech-participants. Some of the contributions also discuss whether generalized conversational implicatures lead to the conventionalization of evidential or epistemic meanings. Finally, methodological issues about the interpretation of corpus data, and issues concerning translatability, enrich the debate on the much discussed topic of conventional and inferred meanings. This issue offers a state-of-the-art introduction and seven papers, dealing with Basque, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.