Evidentiality in interaction: The concessive use of the Italian Future between grammar and discourse

Abstract

Evidentiality in interaction: The concessive use of the Italian Future between grammar and discourse AbstractTwo competing views (an epistemic interpretation vs. an evidential one) are contrasted in analyzing the semantic and pragmatic properties of the Italian Future in its concessive use. By comparing the Future with another concessive marker (the modal potere 'may') the analysis demonstrates the semantic restriction of the Future to factual contexts, which proves at odds with the downgrading of factual commitment required by the traditional epistemic interpretation. A pragmatic analysis centred on the interactional properties of concessivity further supports an evidential interpretation, showing that, as a discourse strategy, the concessive use of the Future signals the evidential role of the speaker, who becomes a secondary source by acknowledging information that is intersubjectively shared with other participants in the interactional exchange. Other modal occurrences of the Italian Future fulfilling various discourse functions are also analyzed as marked interactional strategies used by the speaker to draw attention to states of affairs that are intersubjectively shared in the pragmatic context.

Distance, evidentiality and counter-argumentation: Concessive future in Spanish

“…According to Escandell, thus, concessive future is still a contextual variation of the inferential meaning. Squartini's (2001Squartini's ( , 2012 conception of evidentiality and his explanation of conjectural and concessive future are located in between. In this author's view, evidentiality is a semantic notion which may be grammatically coded in some languages or may be expressed by several mechanisms in others.…”

“…); nevertheless, he has been mistaken at times] (Squartini, 2012: 2119 --adapted from the Spanish version by Gili Gaya [1951] --) For Squartini, whereas conjectural future has the self as its primary source, the speaker places himself as a secondary source in concessive future, acknowledging information which is intersubjectively shared by other participants. Squartini argues that concessive future is intersubjective both in the sense expressed by Traugott (2010) and as it was defined by Nuyts (2001a,b) or Cornillie (2009).…”

“…[I forgot my keys. I am fut stupid] (Squartini, 2012(Squartini, : 2125 From a formal perspective, Rivero (2014) has also recently dealt with the evidential value of Spanish future. She considers future morphemes as modals with an evidential base, in which modal strength may vary depending on both the type of source --realistic or informational, in Kratzer's terms --and the anchoring conditions.…”

“…(b) Escandell (2010Escandell ( , 2014 argues that concessive future is nothing but a contextual variation of the primary evidential value (an instruction for the addressee to assume that the propositional content has a speaker's intuitive inference as its only source); thus, it is characterized as non-factual and explained as echoic. (c) Squartini (2012) considers that concessive future represents a new semantic extension, the isolation of which stems from its factuality. This new semantic extension refers to an intersubjectively shared external source.…”

“…More specifically, it is argued that concessive future does not merely represent a contextual variant of conjectural future (Escandell, 2010) but a new use (Squartini, 2012) which is restricted by the activated status of the proposition (Dryer, 1996). Unlike conjectural future, concessive future does not have an inferential purpose; instead, it plays a role within the (counter) argumentation process.…”