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Discourse Particles: Syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and historical aspects
Edited by Xabier Artiagoitia, Arantzazu Elordieta and Sergio Monforte
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 276] 2022
► pp. 209–228

Chapter 8
Meaning and use of the Basque particle bide

| University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)
| University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)

In this work we study the meaning and use of the Basque particle bide. We contend that, uttering a bide-sentence, the speaker asserts the proposition she would assert had she uttered a sentence without bide, but conveys additional evidential and doxastic information. She conveys that the evidence for the belief she expresses is indirect and that she is not absolutely certain on its truth–although it seems that the latter is sometimes cancellable. To put it in speech-act theoretic terms, bide is an illocutionary force indicator with no contribution to the propositional content of the speech act, which imposes to the assertion a certain preparatory condition and, perhaps, a constraint on the degree of strength of the belief expressed.

Keywords: doxastic dimension, evidential dimension, illocutionary force, propositional content
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Morphosyntactic characteristics of bide
  • 3. Bide : Evidential and doxastic meaning
  • 4.A speech-act theoretical account of bide
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Abbreviations used
  • Notes
  • References
  • Corpus
Published online: 17 May 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.276.08kor
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