< Back to previous page

Publication

On speaker commitment and speaker involvement. Evidence from evidentials in Spanish talk-in-interaction

Journal Contribution - Journal Article

In this paper I address the question why most evidential expressions convey speaker commitment by default and how they vary in terms of speaker involvement. I explore the distinction between commitment and non-commitment (not gradable) (cf. Katriel and Dascal 1989, Kissine 2008), on the one hand, and degrees and types of involvement (gradable), on the other. In evidentiality studies, speaker commitment is seen as the commitment of the speaker to the proposition, which is usually defined on the basis of the reliability of the sources of information (e.g. hearsay, types of inference) (cf. Palmer 1986, Cornillie 2009). Speaker involvement is different in that it can be applied to different levels of analysis. Speaker involvement may refer to the (additional) reasoning by the speaker when (s)he presents a state of affairs, but may also involve the hearer in the organization of the sequence. I will claim that speaker involvement is too often seen from the speaker’s perspective, i.e. leaving aside the speaker-hearer dynamics. On the basis of evidence from Spanish al parecer ‘apparently’ and por lo visto ‘seemingly’, I will describe different degrees of involvement in terms of speaker involvement in the conceptualization of the proposition and speaker involvement in the flow of discourse.
Journal: Journal of Pragmatics
ISSN: 0378-2166
Issue: 2
Volume: 128
Pages: 161 - 170
Publication year:2018
BOF-keylabel:yes
IOF-keylabel:yes
BOF-publication weight:1
CSS-citation score:2
Authors from:Higher Education
Accessibility:Open