“I DIDN’T SAY IT. SOMEBODY ELSE DID.” THE ROMANIAN HEARSAY MARKER CICĂ
“I DIDN’T SAY IT. SOMEBODY ELSE DID.” THE ROMANIAN HEARSAY MARKER CICĂ

Summary/Abstract: Romanian employs a particular evidential marker that has developed from the third person singular formof the verb ‘to say’ plus a subjunction (a complementiser = C), namely cică from (se) zice că ‘(one/)he/she says’ (cf.Ion cică fumează vs. Ion zice că fumează). This adverb encodes the fact that what is said by the speaker is nothis/her own (“I didn’t say it.”) but second hand knowledge (“Somebody else did.”); it is typical of spokenconversation. Similar adverbs based on a verb of saying + complementiser (here called SAYSC) are found in otherRomance varieties, e.g. Latin-American Spanish (dizque), Brazilian Portuguese, Galician (disque), Sardinian(nachi) and Southern Italian (Sicilian dicica). In general, adverbs derived from the pattern lexical predicate +incorporated complementiser (PREDICATEC-adverbs) are involved in various interpretational domains mostly withinthe left periphery of the sentence, in particular evidentiality (i.e. the source of the information) and epistemicmodality (probability according to the knowledge of the speaker) (cică SAYSC, parcă SEEMSC, credcă BELIEVEC,pisinică BYSIGNC, matincă MEFEARC for – regional – Romanian). In this paper I discuss the syntax and thesemantics of cică in Romanian and put forward a proposal with regard to the reconstruction of its diachronicdevelopment. This proposal is based on properties common to parentheticals and provides a valuable examplemodel for the development of similar SAY-elements in other languages (for example, in addition to Italian dice,Greek lei, Macedonian veli, Croatian kaže) and for the development of PREDICATEC-elements in general.

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