Herb, Bruce,
    I want to say first that this has been very helpful to me, including
the charts.
    If you are trained in or practice journalism, you learn that
evidentiality is a kind of hedging. You need to be clear about the
source of a perspective or information, but you also supply
information that relates to the bias or reliability of the source. "X,
A member of the city council who plans to run against mayor Y in the
next election, has accused the mayor of misappropriating funds..." The
council member may be in a position to know, but is also in a position
to benefit from a diminished reputation for the mayor. It's a complex
judgment.
    We also have this sort of pairing: "She may be sleeping." (modal hedging)
    "Maybe she is sleeping" (adverbial hedging.)
   If you come at this from the functional side--how do we ground our
statements; how do we let the reader know how we know what we know,
both the source and the limits of our authority--then it becomes clear
that there are a number of language resources available, some in the
grammar, some in the lexicon.
    Grammar in the context of writing ought to be a highly contextual
grammar, which means we look at how it works in harmony (we hope) with
the writer's unfolding purposes. For the journalist and scientist, we
hope that those purposes are not personal. There is a discipline to
it, without which science and journalism lose their credibility and
their power.

Craig


Bruce,
>
> I agree that English has grammaticalized the speaker’s attitude towards
> the truth value of a proposition, which, as you show below, is a primary
> function of modals.  Evidentiality has more to do with how the speaker has
> come to know a proposition and allows the hearer to draw similar
> inferences.  And you’re right that the distinction you were making
> earlier was more about modality than about evidentiality.
>
> Herb
>
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bruce Despain
> Sent: Friday, January 14, 2011 7:16 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Richness of language - HTML format
>
> Thanks Herb.  What I was touching on was the sense of hypothesis and
> irrealis that I believe Engish may mark with the past tense form of modals
> and the present and past subjunctive forms (in some verbs).  I would think
> these forms would count as grammaticalizations. I don't think the forms
> you listed for evidentiality would be the only ones used as modal markers.
>  Maybe these are simply semantic categories that our culture has made a
> practice of distinguishing.  I think I can find various degrees of
> certainty with which the speaker is able to hedge a hypothetical statement
> using a modal (9) or something close to a modal (4 more).  The statement
> about Caesar would have been at level three.
>
> Modal                  Subjective statement
> Hedging statement
> might be              Shawn might be six feet tall.
> It’s quite possible, but I doubt it.
> may be                Shawn may be six feet tall.
> It’s quite possible.
> could be              Shawn could be six feet tall.
> It’s quite believable, but I doubt it.
> can be                Shawn can be six feet tall.
> It’s quite believable.
> should be             Shawn should be six feet tall.
> It’s evidently so.
> be supposed to be Shawn is supposed to be six feet tall.        People
> think so.
> ought to be          Shawn ought to be six feet tall.
> It’s quite reasonable.
> would be             Shawn would be six feet tall.                     I
> judge it to be so.
> will be                 Shawn will be six feet tall.
> All must judge it to be so.
> have to be           Shawn has to be six feet tall.
> It’s the only reasonable conclusion.
> have got to be     Shawn has got to be six feet tall.              The
> contrary is unthinkable.
> had better be       Shawn had better be six feet tall.              I have
> a personal interest in it being so.
> must be               Shawn must be six feet tall.                     The
> contrary is impossible.
>
> Maybe we can't claim grammaticalization for these expressions, but perhaps
> the modal system has expanded to fill the void left by the loss of the
> subjunctive (or pushed it out).  I've also noticed some of these
> expressions more common in British English, e.g., "will be" and some more
> common in American English, e.g., "has to be."
>
> Bruce
>
> --- [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: "STAHLKE, HERBERT F" <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
> To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: Richness of language - HTML format
> Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2011 20:52:34 -0500
>
> Bruce,
>
>
> I think you're touching on the topic of evidentiality, something that
> English has not grammaticalized.  Other languages, perhaps as many as a
> quarter of the world's languages, do grammaticalize evidentiality to some
> degree.  Here's an example provided by Wikipedia of evidential suffixes in
> Eastern Pomo (California, extinct):
> Grammatical evidentiality may be expressed in different forms (depending
> on the language), such as through
> affixes<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affix>,
> clitics<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clitic>, or
> particles<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_particle>. For example,
> Eastern Pomo<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Pomo> has 4 evidential
> suffixes<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affix> that are added to verbs,
> -ink’e (nonvisual sensory), -ine (inferential), -·le (hearsay), -ya
> (direct knowledge).
>
> Evidentials in Eastern Pomo
>
>
> Evidential type
>
>
> Example Verb
>
>
> Gloss
>
>
> nonvisual sensory
>
>
> pʰa·békʰ-ink’e
>
>
> "burned"
> [speaker felt the sensation]
>
>
> inferential
>
>
> pʰa·bék-ine
>
>
> "must have burned"
> [speaker saw circumstantial evidence]
>
>
> hearsay (reportative)
>
>
> pʰa·békʰ-·le
>
>
> "burned, they say"
> [speaker is reporting what was told]
>
>
> direct knowledge
>
>
> pʰa·bék-a
>
>
> "burned"
> [speaker has direct evidence, probably visual]
>
>
> (McLendon 2003)
>
>
>
> We can do some things like this with modals in English, but usually the
> best we can do is by selecting verbs like “feel,” “smell,”
> “appear,” “seem,” etc.
>
>
>
> It surprising how much assumption we bring to sentences in isolation.
> When I’ve asked students how many meanings “Time flies like an
> arrow” has, a surprising number will say just one and after some thought
> maybe two.
>
>
>
> Herb
>
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bruce Despain
> Sent: Thursday, January 13, 2011 6:33 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Richness of language
>
>
>
> Sometimes it might be appropriate to point out some of the ambiguities of
> syntactic structure that come with language, that the interpreter needs to
> sort though and resolve. Usually this is done so automatically and
> unconsiously that we forget that such a thing must be happening. Consider
> as an example a simple sentence containing a (past) modal auxiliary
> together with its (perfect) participle from Reed & Kellogg. It will become
> obvious, I think, how diagramming by their method can be quite
> superficial.
>
>
>
> "Cæsar could have been crowned."
>
>
>
> I think the  most  obvious  interpretation would paraphrase as the past
> possibility of the occurrence of the event:
>
>
>
> 1) "It could have been that Cæsar was crowned (by his soldiers)."
>
>
>
> The modal might take on a more subjective and hypothetical mode so that we
> have just the possible judgement of the author as to the past event:
>
>
>
> 2) "I could say that Cæsar was crowned (by his soldiers)."
>
>
>
> Then the participle might be interpreted not as an event in the passive
> voice, but a more static state of affairs — past possibility of a state
> of affairs:
>
>
>
> 3) "It could have been that Cæsar was crowned." (He was king.)
>
>
>
> The last logical combination of the double ambiguity of modal and
> participle would be the possible judgement as to the past state of
> affairs:
>
>
>
> 4) "I could say that Cæsar was crowned." (He was king.)
>
>
>
> The construction of the language allows all of these interpretations to be
> present, and yet from the greater context of the utterance the mind
> handles this as a very fuzzy concept until more context is available.
> Often the interpretation is set up beforehand with backgrounding so that
> the interpreter immediately knows, for example, whether the author's
> judgement is involved or an objective statement is being asserted.  Of
> course, at any time the interpreter could be following a primrose path
> ending in humor or confusion.
>
>
>
> I would find it nearly impossible to talk about these things with anyone
> without there first being a appropriate set of terms for what is going on
> grammatically.
>
>
>
> Bruce
>

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