The rise of the evidential readings of the Catalan periphrasis deure + infinitive
In Romance, epistemic readings of modal verbs have traditionally been dealt with in terms of probability or epistemic commitment of the speaker (Spanish deber, French devoir, Italian dovere). Over the last years, new contributions have suggested the shared epistemic and evidential nature of these auxiliary verbs, with special attention to their evidential inferential value (cf. Squartini 2004, 2008, Pietrandrea 2005, Cornillie 2007). Moreover, Cornillie (2009) argues that an evidential expression can have different epistemic readings and, hence, often demonstrates varying degrees of commitment. This chapter is concerned with the rise of the evidential reading of the Catalan modal verb deure which emerges from original dynamic and deontic readings (Sentí 2017). An in-depth analysis of the semantic and pragmatic features of the bridging contexts attested in the corpus (CICA) will account for the conventionalization of the new meaning between the origins of the Catalan language and the 16th century. The analysis of the empirical data confirms the view of deure as an evidential verb, with only secondary epistemic effects. In line with Cornillie (2009), inferential readings cannot be defined in terms of a specific degree of epistemic commitment.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Epistemic modality and inferential evidentiality
- 3.The rise of the inferential value of the periphrasis with deure + infinitive
- 3.1Transitional inferential values in different stages
- 3.2First attestations with the evidential inferential value (13th c.–1350)
- 3.3The conventionalization of the inferential values (1350–1600)
- 3.3.1Second half of the 14th century and the 15th century
- 3.3.2The 16th century
- 4.The periphrasis deure + infinitive as an evidential marker
- 5.Conclusions
-
Notes
-
Abbreviations
-
Bibliography
References
Bibliography
Anderson, Lloyd B.
1986 Evidentials, Paths of Change, and Mental Maps: Typologically Regular Asymmetries. In:
Evidentiality: The linguistic coding of epistemology,
Wallace Chafe, and
Johanna Nichols (eds.), 273–312. Norwood: Ablex Publishing Corporation.
Bybee, Joan L., Revere Perkins, and William Pagliuca
1994 The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press.
CICA = Corpus Informatitzat del Català Antic (CICA). Joan Torruella
(dir.) with
M. Pérez Saldanya,
J. Martines, and
V. Martines,
[URL] [accessed
2009–2013].
CIGCA = Corpus Informatitzat de la Gramàtica del Català Antic. Josep Martines, and Vicent Martines
(dirs.) In:
Corpus Informatitzat Multilingüe de Textos Antics i Contemporanis [CIMTAC], with
M. A. Fuster,
E. Sánchez and technical coordination by
R. Ruiz. Alacant: ISIC-IVITRA [accessed
2010–2013].
Cornillie, Bert
2007 Evidentiality and Epistemic Modality in Spanish (Semi) Auxiliaries: A Cognitive-Functional Approach. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Dendale, Patrick
1994
Devoir épistémique, marqueur modal ou évidentiel? Langue française 102: 24–40.
Ernout, Alfred and Antoine Meillet
1979 Dictionnaire Étymologique de la langue latine. Histoire des mots. Paris: Editions Klincksieck.
Fleischman, Suzanne
1982 The Future in Thought and Language. Diachronic Evidence from Romance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Floyd, Rick
1999 The Structure of Evidential Categories in Wanka Quechua. Dallas: The Summer Institute of Linguistics.
Goossens, Louis
1999 Metonymic bridges in modal shifts. In:
Metonymy in Language and Thought,
Klaus-Uwe Panther, and
Günter Radden (eds), 193–210. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Goossens, Louis
2000 Patterns of meaning extension, ‘parallel chaining’, subjectification and modal shifts. In:
Metaphor and Metonymy at the Crossroads. A Cognitive Perspective,
Antonio Barcelona (ed.), 149–169. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Martín Rodríguez, Antonio Ma
2002
Debeo, verbe de modalité. In:
Les modalités en latin,
Michèle Fruyt, and
Claude Moussy (eds.), 149–161. Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne.
Mortelmans, Tanja
2002 ‘Wieso sollte ich dich küssen, du hässlicher Mensch!’ A study of the German modals sollen and müssen as ‘grounding predications’ in interrogatives. In:
Grounding: The Epistemic Footing of Deixis and Reference,
Frank Brisard (ed.), 391–432. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Sentí, Andreu
2015a Subjectification and attenuation in the conceptual schema of the Catalan modal verb deure with evidential meaning.
eHumanista/IVITRA 8: 517–543.
Sentí, Andreu
2015b Modal verbs, future and grammaticalization in Old Catalan. A cognitive approach.
Catalan Journal of Linguistics 14: 179–198.
Sentí, Andreu
2017 Modalitat i evidencialitat en català antic. Un acostament cognitiu a les perífrasis verbals amb deure i amb haver. València, Barcelona: Institut Interuniversitari de Filologia Valenciana & Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat.
Sentí, Andreu, and Jordi M. Antolí
2014 La inferència en l’aflorament dels valors evidencials en català antic.
Caplletra 56: 157–183.
Squartini, Mario
2004 Disentangling evidentiality and epistemic modality in Romance.
Lingua 114(7): 873–889.
Squartini, Mario
2008 Lexical vs. grammatical evidentiality in French and Italian.
Linguistics 46(5): 917–947.
Squartini, Mario
2010 Where mood, modality and illocution meet: the morphosyntax of Romance conjectures. In:
Modality and Mood in Romance. Modal Interpretation, Mood Selection and Mood Alternation,
Martin G. Becker, and
Eva-Maria Remberger (eds.), 109–219. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs, and Richard B. Dasher
2002 Regularity in Semantic Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
van der Auwera, Johan, and Vladimir A. Plungian
1998 Modality’s semantic map.
Linguistic Typology 2: 79–124.
Yllera, Alicia
1980 Sintaxis histórica del verbo español: las perífrasis medievales. Zaragoza: Universidad de Zaragoza.
Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.