Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

¿Atenuación del compromiso del hablante?: el caso de los evidenciales "por lo visto" y "se ve que"

2018; Volume: 34; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.15581/008.34.3.1179-214

2174-0917

Marta Albelda Marco,

Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies

A large part of the bibliography on evidential markers in Spanish points to mitigation of commitment (or responsibility) for what has been said as one of their defining features. However, the notion of mitigation and that of speaker commitment have both been used in different senses in different studies. In this paper, the meanings assigned to these terms are reviewed and, following Cornillie/Delbecque, the notions of speaker commitment and speaker involvement are distinguished. These operate in opposite directions in some evidential uses: (i) from reportative evidences to conjectural inferentials, there is a scale of lesser to greater speaker involvement; (ii) among the inferentials, a scale of greater to lesser speaker commitment ranging from circumstantials to conjecturals can be observed. This proposal is then applied to the evidentials por lo visto and se ve (que). The corpus shows that compared to por lo visto, se ve (que) indicates more mitigation of speaker commitment but greater speaker involvement.