The expression of epistemicity and evidentiality in Sicilian. The -ca adverbs

Abstract

In this paper I describe the linguistic means available in Sicilia to express the categories of epistemicity and evidentiality. Despite the acknowledged differences on a conceptual and theoretical level, I will show that in Sicilian the same process of word formation has given rise to epistemic and evidential elements, a process which originates in the fusion of a lexical element (a verb or an adjective) with the complementizer -ca: dicica, parica, penzica e capacica. From a morphological and syntactic viewpoint, these elements behave like adverbs; semantically, they offer clear examples of modal and functional distinctions, sometimes even subtle (e.g. in relation to an epistemic scale). Given the reduced autonomy of these Sicilian evidential and epistemic adverbs, the process that has led to their formation could be viewed as a process of grammaticalization. A careful analysis of the evidential adverbs, moreover, leads us to conclude that these elements have the same functions as grammatical evidentials in other languages, thus making the distinction between lexical and grammatical expressions less relevant than what has often been claimed.