The contribution of evidentials to utterance content: Evidence from the Basque reportative particle omen

The aim of the present work is to provide evidence for two debates in the formal literature on evidentiality (i) whether the evidential content of evidential elements is in the scope of (certain) operators, and (ii) whether the evidential content can be directly assented/rejected or challenged. We argue, based on the main semantic and pragmatic properties of the Basque reportative particle omen, that, on the one hand, evidential content can have narrow scope within certain operators, and, on the other hand, it can be rejected (contrary to what is claimed to happen crosslinguistically). Based on these conclusions, we contend that the role of omen is best interpreted as contributing to the truth conditions or the propositional content of the utterance, and not to its illocutionary force or as a presupposition trigger. We argue that, by using omen, speakers assert that the reported proposition has been stated (or written) by someone other than themselves. Omen has no other semantic meaning. In our view, the speaker’s expression of uncertainty often attributed to omen, if it is present, belongs to the pragmatic content of the utterance and, more precisely, is a generalized conversational implicature of the omen-utterance. Grice’s (1989a [1975], 1989b [1978]) cancelability ‘test’ and the data from several corpora support our conclusion. The speaker’s expression of uncertainty is explicitly or contextually cancelable, and we found many examples in which the speaker’s certainty about either the truth or falsity of the reported proposition is clear. In addition, inspired by Korta & Perry 2011a, we distinguish between three contents, or sets of truth conditions, involved in an omen-utterance, relative to the possible status of the original speaker. Moreover, the results of another test (which can be called the reportability test) show that speakers tend not to use omen to report nonliteral contents (particularized conversational implicatures and presuppositions, at least).