Pragmatic Constraints on Evidential and Epistemic Choice (Peech)

• Applicant: Dr. Jun Chen
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 580949893

In uttering a sentence, a speaker may say something about a proposition without being fully committed to it. This is possible with the content of the proposition qualified by an evidential or an epistemic expression. The speaker may attach an evidential marker (e.g. appear to) to the proposition, which specifies the speaker's perceptual-cognitive access to the information (Aikhenvald 2004). The speaker may alternatively append an epistemic modal (e.g. must), which reflects their assessment of the truth of said proposition (Kratzer 1981). The two constructions commonly serve to reduce the social responsibility for making such a statement: By ascribing to (the fallibility of) an external source or an estimation, the speaker would not be held responsible in the case of a false claim (Valentine 2011; Krifka 2017, 2024). Note that in both strategies, the speaker may rely on the evidence available to them under the same context (Faller 2002, Dehaan 2008), e.g. the speaker saw that the lights were on at John's place. Two statements can be made with reference to this same piece of evidence: John must be/appears to be at home. It follows that if the evidence is not reliable, the speaker will have less confidence. A natural question would then be when would the speaker choose to present the kind of confidence they have as opposed to the sort of evidence available, e.g. the choice of adopting an epistemic versus an evidential. Given these similarities, the proposed project seeks to identify the pragmatic (discourse or interactional) conditions driving the speaker’s decision in providing epistemic and evidential qualification. A large body of literature has compared between the categories of epistemicity and evidentiality. However, there remains a lack of works that develop a theory of use that predict when the speaker chooses an evidential over an epistemic, and vice versa. The focus has been on the (dis)similarities between these two categories in terms of truth-conditional meaning and structure. The few existing studies that deal with pragmatic aspects tend to examine their similar role in qualifying the proposition, or variation within a single (epistemic or evidential) domain, rather than on what governs the choice between the two. The proposed project is dedicated to filling this gap by looking into the speaker’s strategic positioning of information, namely, whether they aim to assert personal epistemic authority and preempt alternative interpretations (as with epistemics), or to defer judgment and invite interlocutor inference (as with evidentials). To ensure empirical clarity, controlled experimental methods will be adopted to isolate key variables that are independently shown to constrain the possible space of interpretation between the two categories. Understanding their differences in use crucially informs our understanding of speaker-oriented meaning and its broader connection with realms of speech act, intersubjectivity and (meta)communication.

• DFG Programme: Position