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Part of
New Directions in Grammaticalization Research
Edited by Andrew D.M. Smith, Graeme Trousdale and Richard Waltereit
[Studies in Language Companion Series 166] 2015
► pp. 93–120

Epistemic/evidential markers of the type verb + complementizer

Some parallels from English and Romance

| University of Santiago de Compostela
| University of Santiago de Compostela

English and Romance possess a particularly interesting way of expressing evidentiality and epistemicity, namely markers involving a verb of saying, knowing, or seeming followed by a complementizer (Verb+C), as Spanish dizque, Galician seica, and English looks like. In this chapter we consider the parallels between the English and the Romance formations and describe them as resulting from processes of grammaticalization and (inter)subjectification. We show that in their development these Verb+C epistemic/evidential markers undergo decategorialization, morphosyntactic fixation, and fusion, and acquire new semantico-pragmatic functions, encoding subjective meanings such as evidentiality and epistemic stance. The study of these Verb+C markers contributes to broader theoretical discussions about the predictive power of grammaticalization and about the origin of clausal parentheticals.

Published online: 8 April 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.166.05lop
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