Relativism and Universalism in Linguistics - Fachbereich 10 ...

164 Workshops
Reports and quotatives in the diachronic evolution
of the Italian pare / sembra evidential pair
Squartini, Mario
Università di Torino
msquart@yahoo.com
Aikhenvald (2004: 177-178) describes grammatical systems in which a general reportive
marker coexists with a more specific quotative form, the latter specifying the exact source of
the quoted report. Elaborating on Aikhenvald’s distinction it will be argued that a formal
opposition report / quotative is not only applicable to synchronic descriptions of grammatical
systems but is also relevant in diachronic analyses of semi-grammatical items such as the
Italian verb pair pare / sembra ‘seem’.
In particular it will be demonstrated that the evidential meaning of pare, which is restricted to
inferences and general reports in Modern Italian, also occurs in quotative contexts in Old
Italian. The diachronic evolution of pare, as well as its only partially overlapping distribution
with sembra, will be described in detail on the basis of corpus data and compared with the
behaviour of corresponding forms in other Romance languages such as Spanish parecer (see
Cornillie 2004). More generally, the data will be considered with respect to the following still
heavily debated issues:
• the interplay between epistemicity and evidentiality (as noted by Aikhenvald 2004:
193 reportive evidentials “can develop an epistemic extension of unreliable
information as a means of shifting responsibility”, which is the case with the Italian
verbs pare / sembra);
• the role of lexical evidentiality and the continuum between lexical and
(semi)grammatical forms (the two verbs involved, pare and sembra, both belong to
the closed class of raising verbs but show different degrees of semantic bleaching, a
possible clue of grammaticalization);
• the relationship among different evidential submeanings (like Spanish parecer, Italian
pare / sembra cover not only reports but also other indirect modes of knowing such as
inferences).
References
Aikhenvald, Alexandra (2004). Evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cornillie, Bert (2004). Evidentiality and epistemic modality in Spanish (semi-) auxiliaries. A
functional-pragmatic and cognitive-linguistic account. Doctoral dissertation, Faculteit
Letteren, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.
Realizations of indirect evidence and probability in English and
Lithuanian
Usonienė, Aurelija
Vilnius University
aurelia@usonis.lt
The paper is devoted to the analysis of quantitative and qualitative parameters of equivalence
between the lexical expressions of epistemic qualification of evidentiality and probability in
English and Lithuanian. The paper will look at realizations of the source of knowledge in
terms of indirectness of evidence and whether/how it is related to probability. The focus will
be on the meaning and function of the Lithuanian ‘quotative’ particle ESĄ (‘participialbe’), the