Evidential strategies in English: not just lexical

Abstract

English is generally considered to lack grammaticalized evidential markers (Aikhenvald 2004. Evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press). However, Mélac (2022. The grammaticalization of evidentiality in English. English Language and Linguistics 26(2). 331–359) argues that certain uses of seem and other English verbs have grammaticalized as evidentials. He also offers several other examples of what he calls “(semi-)grammaticalized” evidentials. In this article I provide evidence that English also has grammaticalized evidential strategies in the choice between the present and past tenses when either is possible in a particular context, as well as in the use of certain determiners with proper names referring to specific individuals. The relevant contexts involve representation of particular points of view relating broadly to information source through tense and determiner choices. This analysis supports the work of researchers such as Figueras-Bates and Kotwica (2020. Introduction: Evidentiality, epistemicity and mitigation in Spanish. Corpus Pragmatics 4. 1–9: 13), among others, that evidentiality is best seen as “a discursive-pragmatic phenomenon.”