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Evidentiality Revisited: Cognitive grammar, functional and discourse-pragmatic perspectives
Edited by Juana I. Marín-Arrese, Gerda Haßler and Marta Carretero
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 271] 2017
► pp. 87–104

Chapter 3
On the evidential use of English adverbials and their equivalents in Romance languages and Russian

A morpho-syntactic analysis

| Potsdam University
| Potsdam University
| Potsdam University
The present study investigates the use of equivalents of the English adverbials seemingly and apparently with a specific morphological structure in Romance languages and Russian, i.e. Spanish al parecer, Portuguese ao parecer and ao que parece, French avoir l’air de, Italian all’apparenza and in apparenza as well as Russian по-видимому. The underlying hypothesis is that the function and syntactic behaviour of these adverbial locutions are motivated by their morphological composition. It is to investigate whether the adverbials may be used sentence-initially, parenthetically, as an adverbial with broad or narrow scope or as a component of a modalised predication. The adverbial locutions are treated as means of expression where evidentiality and epistemic modality represent overlapping functional-semantic categories.
Keywords: adverbial locutions, morphological structure, scope, evidentiality, epistemic modality
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Morphological structure and epistemic and evidential functions
    • 2.1Morphological structure
    • 2.2Spanish al parecer
    • 2.3Russian ‘по-видимому’
    • 2.4Portuguese ao parecer/ao que parece
    • 2.5Italian all’apparenza / in apparenza
    • 2.6French avoir l’air de
  • 3.Interlingual generalisation and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 21 March 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.271.04boh
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