ON THE USE OF EVIDENTIAL STRATEGIES IN ROMANIAN. THE CASE OF CUM CĂ
ON THE USE OF EVIDENTIAL STRATEGIES IN ROMANIAN. THE CASE OF CUM CĂ

Summary/Abstract: Evidentiality comprises a category of linguistic markers responsible for indicating the source of knowledge lying behind assertions. Initially studied in the Amerindian languages that make use of verbal affixes in order to express that the information communicated in an utterance is the result of direct perception, of an inference or it is hearsay content, recent studies have been trying to enlarge the field of analysis to languages that do not have a grammatical category of evidentiality. Referred to as evidential strategies and defined as forms that are not primarily endowed with evidential meaning, but can contextually validate such an interpretation (Aikhenvald, 2004), linguistic forms with evidential usage do not have recurrent and uniform functioning in discourse and may be either lexical or grammatical. For Romanian, this phenomenon is tackled with by the linguist R. Zafiu in the latest edition of Gramatica Limbii Române (GA, Editura Academiei Române, 2008: 715-718) as a sub-domain of the epistemic modality, opposed to the cognitive modality. The aim of this article is to reconsider one of the evidentials (which we call evidential indicators) discussed in GA, i. e. cum că (an equivalent of the reporting THAT), to provide further contexts in order to highlight its contextual behaviour, and to investigate the argumentative effects of its use in discourse*.

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