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Part of
Evidence for Evidentiality
Edited by Ad Foolen, Helen de Hoop and Gijs Mulder
[Human Cognitive Processing 61] 2018
► pp. 99–120

Chapter 4
(Yo) creo que as a marker of evidentiality and epistemic modality

Evidence from Twitter

| Radboud University Nijmegen

This chapter surveys the use of the first person present of the cognitive verb creer ‘believe’ in contemporary Peninsular Spanish. It is based on data that were gathered from Twitter. The different functions of creo ‘I believe’ are closely related to a limited set of syntactic patterns. Creo with complementizer que proves to be a highly frequent and prolific marker of evidentiality, epistemic modality and related functions. After a detailed description of these functions, I focus on creo que with and without subject personal pronoun yo. While creo que fits all functions equally well, the use of yo creo que is more restricted to speaker-oriented, subjective functions.

Keywords: cognitive verb, creer , first person, Spanish, subject pronoun
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Epistemic modality and evidentiality: theory and practice
  • 3.Twitter language
  • 4. Pienso and me parece
  • 5. Creo
    • 5.1 (Yo) creo que
    • 5.2 Creo que or yo creo que
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.61.05mul
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Cited by

Cited by 2 other publications

Martínez Vázquez, Montserrat
2023. Chapter 10. A constructional analysis of digo yo in peninsular Spanish. In Constructions in Spanish [Constructional Approaches to Language, 34], ► pp. 255 ff. DOI logo
Mulder, Gijs
2017. When feeling is thinking. In Evidentiality Revisited [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 271], ► pp. 105 ff. DOI logo

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