The encoding of epistemic operations in two Romance languages: intonation and pragmatic markers

For years linguists have noted that intonation patterns and sentence-final discourse particles encode similar meanings across languages (e.g., [23], [21]). Yet the division of labor between the two kinds of systems—and in particular whether there exists a compensatory distribution between them— remains to be clarified. In this article, we focus on two languages within the Romance group (Catalan and Friulian) that have been reported to use intonation and pragmatic markers to different extents to mark epistemic meanings (e.g., [17], [18]). A total of 15 speakers per language were asked to participate in a Discourse Completion Task designed to elicit statements with several degrees of speaker commitment. The results show that Catalan and Friulian display an asymmetry in the marking of epistemically-biased statements: while Catalan uses a greater variety of stance-marking intonation contours, Friulian uses a more varied set of stance-marking modal particles and a more restricted set of intonation contours. However, both languages make use of epistemic adverbs together with intonation and place restrictions on how pragmatic particles and intonation are paired, indicating that the relationship between the two systems can be quite complex. Overall, we claim that dynamic semantic models enable us to integrate the study of intonational meaning with other parts of the grammar into a unified approach.