El condicional com a marcador epistèmic i evidencial en català antic: el condicional evidencial reportatiu amb verbs de dicció

Abstract

This article is centred around the rise of the conditional as an epistemic and evidential marker in reporting contexts in Old Catalan. The process studied begins with a situation in which the conditional 1.) marks the epistemic position of the source with regard to a given state of affairs; it then moves toward 2.) marking the epistemic position of the speaker with regard to the propositional content expressed in the source and, particularly, his non-commitment to this content. Subjectivisation and intersubjectivisation are identified as decisive factors for an understanding of the various semantic and pragmatic facets that reprise evidential conditionals may exhibit. The ongoing grammaticalisation process allowed conditionals from the 15th century onward to function without any further lexical or discursive devices as an epistemic and evidential marker in and of itself.