Latin commitment-markers

This paper gives an analysis of the Latin ‘commitment-markers’ scilicet and videlicet with the help of the research of Simon-Vandenbergen and Aijmer (2007) on English modal adverbs and Nuyts (esp. 2001) on modality and commitment. On the basis of distributional differences and translation networks one may establish the differences between these words. They are both evidential markers that give the speaker’s commitment to the content of what is said and they have a comparable origin. There are however important differences: scilicet (‘of course’) shows that the evidence is based on expectation and is strongly directed towards the addressee, whereas videlicet (‘clearly’) shows that the evidence is inferable from the context or from reasoning and is not directed towards the addressee.

Published online: 14 November 2014
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.165.16sch