Epistemic marking and reliability judgments" Evidence from Bulgarian
نویسنده
چکیده
Most linguists contend that epistemic markers for source-of-information also encode the speaker's assessment of the reliability of that information. Their claim tacitly questions the utility of source-of-information marking and its validity, which depends on the ability to distinguish source-of-information from speaker-attitude marking. I argue that the source of information has a distinct function in the conversational exchange and that it is possible to distinguish source-of-information from speaker-attitude marking. The former does not have consistent implications about the evaluation of the reliability of the information while the latter represents such an evaluation. I use this criterion to assess competing claims about the meaning of grammatical epistemic markers in Bulgarian. The results from two studies suggest that epistemic marking in Bulgarian characterizes the source of information rather than the speaker's attitude. © 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
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