"Omen" bariazioan

Abstract

The present work has as its aim to describe and account for the syntactic and semantic variation in the use of the hearsay evidential particle omen in Basque. The hypothesis I will advance is that evidentiality, and in particular hearsay evidentiality, is syntactically expressed by means of a constellation of syntactic structures. Two main hypotheses are discussed in the context of this paper: (i) on the one hand, Cinque's idea that (hearsay) evidentiality occupies a designated syntactic position in the Left Periphery of the clause, by means of a particular category we will call Evidential Head; (ii) on the other, the view that hearsay evidentiality is, or can be, a subspecies of epistemic modality. I will try to show that the dialectal variation in the syntactic expresión of omen can be seen to instantiate those two possibilities, and that furthermore, a third one must be proposed for some of the Eastern varieties of Basque: there, the hearsay evidential is an independent lexical item that can be merged in different parts of the clause structure. What those positions have in common is that they encode logical operators that take propositional entities as arguments.