From visual perception to evidentiality: A functional empirical approach to se ve que in Spanish

Abstract

The Spanish sequence se ve (que) presents intricate functional polysemy, including constructionalization as an evidential. The present paper investigates its different formal-functional combinations and degrees of specialization as an evidential construction. The following questions were addressed: (1) How many different senses can be distinguished in the sequence se ve (que) and what are their respective frequencies? (2) How do these senses correlate with the morphosyntactic behavior of the sequence se ve (que)? (3) Which senses of se ve (que) are more closely related to each other, and how does the evidential construction relate to this polysemous network? The semantic and formal affinities of se ve (que) were studied through the Behavioral Profiles method developed by Gries and Divjak (2009), which provides an empirical, systematic and verifiable approach to studying lexical phenomena. Its application to a pragmatic phenomenon is a new departure. The results show seven senses of se ve (que), ranging from the lexical value of direct physical perception to the more abstract and evidential value of 'source of information'. According to the corpus analysis, the closest senses to the evidential pole are indirect physical perception and cognitive perception. These all introduce an inflected verb clause, possess propositional scope and are morphosyntactically frozen..

The Boundaries Between Perception and Evidentiality. Dialectal and Diachronic Variation in Se Ve Que

“…The study presented below analyses the diversity of meanings of the form se ve que in a set of geolectal varieties of Spanish and offers a diachronic explanation for such diversity. Recent studies suggest that there is an evidential value in the Spanish sequence se ve que (Cornillie & Gras 2015, Albelda 2016a, Briz 2016, González Vázquez 2016, Marcos Sánchez 2016, Albelda & Jansegers 2019, Figueras 2019. Nevertheless, as the following sections will show, this evidential value, which accounts for more than 90 % of the uses of se ve que in Spanish from Eastern Spain (Albelda & Jansegers 2019), is absent in the majority of Spanishspeaking geographical areas (Albelda 2016, Albelda & Jansegers 2019.…”

“…In other words, he sees some construction works, but he concludes and expresses the phase of the project in which they are at the moment of speech: Cognitive perception, on the other hand, appears in those cases in which perception is totally mental, the reasoning not based on a visual stimulus but on previous knowledge or assumptions. As has been studied (Albelda & Jansegers 2019), cognitive perception can be realised in two ways: either it is an intellectual apprehension of an abstract reality, or it is the result of an inference of the speaker based on his knowledge of the world and logical reasoning. The first case is only possible when se ve introduces stimuli (states of affairs; Boye 2009) and not propositions.…”

More Than an Information Source: A Bibliometric Review of Evidential Studies (1992–2021)

“…De Villers and Garfield (2009) have focused on evidentiality and language acquisition, specifically describing the nature of the evidential system in Tibetan and presenting the challenges that the system imposes on language acquisition. Marco is a professor at the University of Valencia, whose main lines of research are the pragmatic categories of mitigation and intensification as well as evidentiality (Marco, 2016(Marco, , 2018(Marco, , 2019. Regarding her study of evidentiality, she has mainly discussed Spanish evidentials as a mark of genre, as a mitigation of speaker commitment.…”

“…The University of Valencia ranks in first place and has provided a strong basis for research on evidentiality. This is because Kotwica (2015Kotwica ( , 2018Kotwica ( , 2020Kotwica ( , 2021 and Marco (2016Marco ( , 2018Marco ( , 2019 are the main contributors of evidential studies, both of whom are prolific authors with an interest in Spanish evidentials.…”