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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. 105–121

Chapter 4
When feeling is thinking

A lexical-semantic analysis of evidential and epistemic predicates in Spanish

| Radboud University, Nijmegen

This paper presents a survey of the predicates that are used in Spanish to express evidentiality and epistemic modality. After an overview of the whole set and the characteristics of its most frequently used members, I will focus on a subset of predicates which share the fact that they do not lexicalize the act of reasoning or thinking but literally refer to perception and spontaneous mental processes. My analysis of the so-called epistemic/evidential complement-taking predicates is qualitative and based on data gathered mainly from Twitter. It is a lexical-semantic analysis of actual, contemporary usage, which focuses on the semantic characteristics of the category as a whole and the individual verbs.

Keywords: Spanish, evidentiality, epistemic modality, spontaneous mental processes, Twitter corpus.,
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Terminology
  • 3.Epistemic modality, evidentiality, subjectivity
  • 4.E/E CTPs: definition of the category
  • 5.E/E CTPs in Spanish
    • 5.1 Creo que, me parece que and pienso que
    • 5.2Cognition verbs, opinion verbs, performative verbs
    • 5.3Acquisition of knowledge verbs
      • 5.3.1Perception verbs
      • 5.3.2Spontaneous mental process verbs
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 21 March 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.271.05mul
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Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Mulder, Gijs
2018. Chapter 4. (Yo) creo que as a marker of evidentiality and epistemic modality. In Evidence for Evidentiality [Human Cognitive Processing, 61], ► pp. 99 ff. DOI logo

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