Evolution of the Romance Evidentiality along the 20th Century: a Coserian Approach
Evolution of the Romance Evidentiality along the 20th Century: a Coserian Approach

Summary/Abstract: The future tense and the conditional are said to convey evidential meaning in most Romance languages. Whereas the former expresses conjecture, the latter is used to mark reportativity. However, the evidential readings of both tenses could be a very recent semantic extension at a vernacular level, since they are still frequent to express time and modality in nearly all the vernaculars. This study aims to show the geolinguistic and dialect distribution of both tenses along the 20th century in order to determine whether the future and the conditional were already evidential one hundred years ago or they have become so during the last century. Furthermore, I will also show the likely directionality for these tenses to become evidential and I will discuss whether there is a language that has worked as the focus of the Romance evidentiality. In doing so, I will not only apply the Coserian variables of diatopic and diaphasic restraints, but I will compare the differences among the dialects and the norms that rule all of them, analysing the systemic behaviour that favours the future as well as the conditional for marking evidentiality.

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