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Article published In:
Argumentation and Meaning: Semantic and pragmatic reflexions
Edited by Steve Oswald, Sara Greco, Johanna Miecznikowski, Chiara Pollaroli and Andrea Rocci
[Journal of Argumentation in Context 9:1] 2020
► pp. 42–68

At the juncture between evidentiality and argumentation

Evidential verb complementation

 | Università della Svizzera Italiana
The contribution discusses the theoretical problem of the relationship between evidentiality and argumentative justification. Within a framework that combines semantic and syntactic analysis with a topics-based approach to argument schemes, it is argued that the functional domains of information source and argumentation overlap in utterances in which the former is linguistically marked, rather than entailed or implicated: explicit linguistic evidential marking is a special case of argumentation. The connection between a proposition and its source gives rise to a class of arguments from a reliable procedure that are similar to arguments from authority. When the indicated source is an inferential procedure (rather than direct experience or hearsay), the evidential argument may be combined with additional arguments that lay out part of that procedure. The particular case of inferential sources is illustrated by means of an analysis of weakly grammaticalized constructions in Italian, based on verbs of thought, communication and perception that relate a propositional complement to a subject NP or to source / place complements of the verb. The analysis shows that such further complements can either refine the categorization of the inferential source signalled by the verb, thereby contributing to the main argument from a reliable procedure, or express a premise that allows the hearer to reconstruct the internal structure of the procedure.
Keywords: information source, Argumentum Model of Topics, arguments from a reliable procedure, lexical evidential constructions, Italian
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Information source
    • 2.1Evidential frames
    • 2.2Types of information source
    • 2.3Specifying the information source: Strategies of evidential marking
  • 3.Argumentation: Pragma-dialectics and AMT
  • 4.Evidential frames as arguments
    • 4.1How are evidential frames and argumentation related?
    • 4.2Signalled evidential frames as arguments from a reliable procedure and the special case of inferential sources
  • 5.The example of inferential frames marked by verb-complement constructions
    • 5.1Inferential verbs
    • 5.2Complements referring to an element of the speaker’s source
    • 5.3Complements expressing premises in the speaker’s reasoning
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 4 May 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jaic.00007.mie
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