Romanian Evidential Adverbs Revisited
Romanian Evidential Adverbs Revisited

Summary/Abstract: The paper investigates the syntactic and semantic properties of Romanian evidential adverbs, focusing on the adverb ‘cică’. It refutes some of the claims previously made in the literature regarding the syntax and semantic properties of the adverb and proposes an analysis differing in certain respects from that put forward in a previous study, which accounts for its semantic properties as well. The first section reviews some of the literature on the category of evidentiality, arguing, in section 2, along the lines of previous studies, that, although Romanian does not have a grammatical category of evidentiality, it does have a wide range of linguistic devices for expressing the source of evidence, some of which, namely evidential adverbs, maybe analysed as grammaticalized markers of evidentiality. The third section reviews the syntactic properties of the evidential adverb ‘cică’, bringing evidence against some of the claims in Remberger (2015), and proposing a unified analysis of ‘cică’ as an adjunct which may be attached as a parenthetical. The final section addresses some of the semantic properties of the epistemic adverb, proposing a uniform semantic analysis of ‘cică’ as a marker of evidentiality, the additional semantic values being considered to be pragmatic effects of the context. Particular attention is paid to the interaction between evidential adverbs and epistemic adverbs, the proposed analysis refuting their incompatibility on semantic grounds as well.

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