Evidentiality and Epistemic Modality at the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface

It is fairly standard to assume that a speech act consists of an illocutionary level of meaning, F , and a separate level of propositional content, p, such that F takes p as its argument, F (p). This paper is concerned (i) with establishing for one language, Cusco Quechua (CQ), to which of these two levels of meaning its evidential and its epistemic modal markers belong, and (ii) with developing a formal analysis of evidential and epistemic modal illocutionary modifiers. Illocutionary modifiers generally have not received much attention in the formal literature, and formal treatments of evidentials in other languages usually take them to be epistemic modals with evidential presuppositions. Along the way, it will also be argued that evidentiality and epistemic modality as semantic notions are not tied to either level of meaning, that is, both evidentials and epistemic modals occur on both levels. After introducing the relevant linguistic markers in CQ in section 1, I will discuss some tests for distinguishing between illocutionary and propositional-level modifiers and apply them to the CQ markers. Some of the tests can only positively identify propositional operators (embedding, scoping under propositional operators), and it is therefore quite difficult to positively establish an element as an illocutionary modifier. Section 3 begins to develop a formal analysis of these markers in sdrt, which is one of the few existing frameworks that integrates both levels of meaning. The account to be developed analyzes the evidentials as giving rise to evidential sincerity conditions which in turn affect the speaker’s beliefs.