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Tense, Aspect, Modality, and Evidentiality: Crosslinguistic perspectives
Edited by Dalila Ayoun, Agnès Celle and Laure Lansari
[Studies in Language Companion Series 197] 2018
► pp. 83–108

Chapter 5
Evidentiality and the TAM systems in English and Spanish

A cognitive and cross-linguistic perspective

| Universidad Complutense de Madrid

This chapter examines and proposes plausible explanations for attested extensions of tense-aspect-modality (TAM) systems to inferential and reportative evidentiality based on the contrastive case study – British English (BrE) vs. Peninsular Spanish (PSp) – of some TAM markers realizing evidential functions: epistemic modals ‘must’, ‘must have’, and ‘deber (de)’, ‘deber (de) haber’; future perfect verbal forms ‘will have’, ‘habrá/n’; and conditional perfect verbal forms ‘would have’, ‘habría/n’. It is argued that the parameters playing a crucial role in facilitating these extensions include immediacy in relation to the ground and reality (cf. Langacker 2017) for inferential values, while irrealis (cf. Givon 1989) and frame-shifting to a counter point of view (Chilton 2014) are relevant for reportative evidentiality.

Keywords: evidentiality, inferential, reportative, modality, TAM systems
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Evidentiality and the TAM systems in English and Spanish
    • 2.1Dimensions and parameters of evidentiality
    • 2.2TAM systems in European languages: Epistemicity and inferentiality
    • 2.3Temporality-aspectuality and epistemicity
    • 2.4Temporality-aspectuality and reportativity
  • 3.The case study: Hypotheses, research objectives and methodology
    • 3.1Hypotheses and research objectives
    • 3.2Case study: Corpora
    • 3.3 Research design: Data collection and procedure
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1 Results: Epistemic modal > inferential evidentiality
    • 4.2Results: Future perfect and conditional perfect > epistemic/inferential values
    • 4.3Results: Conditional perfect > indirect reportative values
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 2 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.197.05mar
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