The Division of Labour in the Interpretation of Romanian Evidentials
The Division of Labour in the Interpretation of Romanian Evidentials

Summary/Abstract: The study is a corpus analysis of the Romanian evidential adverb ‘cică’, with a view to determining its semantic and pragmatic properties. It puts forward a unitary analysis of the semantics of the evidential, accounting for the various nuances it may acquire as the result of its interaction with other epistemic markers and inferences contributed by the context. The first section reviews previous semantic analyses of evidential adverbs in the literature proposing a polysemantic approach. The second and the third section investigate the semantic and pragmatic properties, respectively, that the evidential adverb evinces in examples extracted from the CoRoLa corpus is an attempt to tease apart the contribution of the different epistemic markers, evidentials and the wider context of conversation.

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