Evidentiality and Epistemic Modality: Conceptual and Descriptive Issues

Evidentiality and Epistemic Modality: Conceptual and Descriptive Issues presents ground-breaking research on the domains of evidentiality and epistemic modality. The book includes papers on key theoretical issues (the nature of evidential inference and the challengeability criterion for evidentiality), and descriptive studies covering various European languages (English, Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Romanian, Catalan and Latvian), based on general corpora or specific discourse types. The prominent corpus-based contrastive methodology uncovers a wide range of idiosyncratic discourse-pragmatic features of diverse languages, discourses and genres. The contributions are representative of the work on evidentiality and epistemic modality in a substantial number of countries.