LE « CONDITIONNEL JOURNALISTIQUE » DANS LE DISCOURS MÉDIATIQUE ROUMAIN*
“The journalistic conditional” in the Romanian media

Summary/Abstract: Developed within an extended postdoctoral research, this study discusses the use of the so-called "journalistic conditional" in present Romanian, either in terms of epistemic modality, respectively of the simple evidentiality, or as an interference of these two semantic categories. The hypothesis that we are trying to prove is the following: in the contemporary Romanian this type of conditional works as an epistemic marker and, indirectly, as a strategy which indicates the reportative evidentiality. In this latter aspect, the conditional opposes to the presumptive, the only fully grammaticalized mean which marks in the statement the acquired indirect source of the transmitted information (i.e. the inference). If up to a certain point the diachronic route of the two forms (which originally appear exclusively loaded with temporal values) seems to be identical, they are gradually distancing from an aspectual and modal point of view. In the first case, the conjecture is filtered through inference, in the case of conditional, the distance and the external perspective over the process become fundamental distinctive features.

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