This project focuses on the evidential uses of verbal morphology in (Peninsular) Spanish, French, and Italian. On the empirical side, the project will provide a theoretically informed cross-linguistic description of the common ground updates performed by these evidentials in assertions and non-biased questions, biased questions and embedded declaratives. Data will be collected via several complementary methodologies – informal consultations, corpus studies and experiments. On the theoretical side, the project will develop a formal compositional model that generates the observed parameters of variation and predicts the interactions of the evidentials with different types of speech act and syntactic contexts.
