This volume explores phenomena which come under the heading of epistemic modalities and
evidentiality in more or less well-known languages (Germanic Romance Balto-Slavic Hungarian
Tibetan Lakandon and Yucatec Maya Arwak-Chibchan Kogi and Ika). It reveals cross-linguistic
variations in the structuring of these vast fields of enquiry and clearly demonstrates the
relevance and interplay of multiple factors involved in the analysis of these two conceptual
domains. Although the contributions present diverging descriptive traditions they are
nonetheless within the broad domain of functional-typological linguistics and give access to
distinct yet comparable approaches. They all converge around a number of key issues: modal
verbs the relationship between epistemic modality and evidentiality the relationship of modal
notions with some tense and aspect notions the notions of (inter)subjectivity commitment and
(dis)engagement the prosodic variation of modal adverbs the diachronic connections between
negation and evidential markers the connection with mirativity. The volume is of interest to
linguists and advanced graduate students working in general and theoretical linguistics
semantics pragmatics cognition and typology.
