Linguistic Insights Evidentiality and Modality in European Languages

The volume focuses on discourse-pragmatic studies on evidentiality, epistemic modality, and on deontic modality. It presents studies on the functions and discourse-pragmatic variation of evidential and modal expressions, applying corpus-based methodologies and addressing cross-linguistic issues in several European languages. Evidentiality and Modality in European Languages focuses on discourse-pragmatic studies on the domains of evidentiality and epistemic modality, and also includes studies on deontic modality. The book presents ground-breaking research on the functions and the discourse-pragmatic variation of evidential expressions and modals in diverse discourses and genres, applying corpus-based methodologies. It offers unique features regarding content, usage and methodology, and comparative studies. The comparative viewpoint is addressed in contributions which provide a usage-based cross-linguistic account of the expression of evidentiality and modality in various European languages (English, French, Italian, Romanian and Spanish). The contributions are representative of the work on evidentiality and modality in European languages carried out in a substantial number of countries, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, Romania, Spain and Sweden.