Evidentiality and evidential marking in French.

This project represents a research contract awarded by the University of Antwerp. The supervisor provides the Antwerp University research mentioned in the title of the project under the conditions stipulated by the university.The general topic of this research mission is "evidentiality" or "evidential marking" in French. Within the project there is a subtopic on the epistemic (reportative) 'conditional' ('Il y aurait une quinzaine de victims').During this research mission, on an empirical level, I want to provide an overview and detailed description of the semantics of known, as well as of newly identified French expressions with possible evidential function (reportative, inferential or perceptual).On the theoretical level, the challenge of this project is to characterize the notion of evidentiality in more precise way than has been done so far, in order to establish operational identification criteria to identify expressions with a fundamentally evidential function from expressions with a merely or mainly epistemico-modal function, so that a uniform analysis can be proposed for all the expressions with evidential function in the empirical part of the study of our set.The results of this empirical and theoretical research will be published in a monograph and in a series of acompanying articles, including first of all an overview article of French expressions with evidential function (in fact a short version of the coming book); further a number of detailed studies about expressions with an interesting evidential function (including the epistemic conditional, "visiblement" and others, to be determined during the project ) and one or two articles on the notion of evidentiality and its "auxiliary notions".During this research project I will also finish a small UA KP BOF project with the publication of one or two articles on the awareness and analysis by French grammarians through the centuries, of the reportative conditional.Finally, during this research project I supervise a PhD project on the origins and original meaning of the epistemic conditional and I will start a new project application about adverbial markers of inferential evidentiality in French.

Keywords:FRENCH LANGUAGE, MODALITY, EVIDENTIALITY

Disciplines:Language studies, Linguistics