On the evidential nature of the Italian future

The core question to be addressed when dealing with the future tense is whether it has a temporal or a modal interpretation. Both answers have been investigated in the literature 1. In this paper, we argue for treating the future as a modal and more specifically as an evidential. Unlike previous approaches, which treat it as a universal quantifier over times or world-time pairs 2, we claim that the future, in Italian, belongs to the category of evidential terms. There is also no consensus as to whether evidentiality and epistemic modality are two distinct categories. Some authors have claimed that they are distinct categories. They have thus argued that evidentials assert that there is a particular source for the information conveyed by an utterance, while and epistemic modality ’evaluates the evidence and on the basis of this evaluation it assigns a confidence measure to the speaker’s utterance’ (de Haan, 1999 :85). However, recent studies on evidentials have shown a much closer connection between evidentiality and epistemic modality. In particular, Squartini (2003) (for Italian dovere) and von Fintel and Gillies (2008) have argued that the epistemic modal signals indirect evidence. For example, (1) cannot be felicitously uttered if the speaker has already tasted the kiwi.