B2

Common Ground Management Interactions: Romance Evidentials

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.

Principal Investigator

Dr. Paula Menéndez Benito

Researchers

Robin Edds

Student Assistants

Judith Cobler Andreu
Symbat Kudabayeva

Project Activities

Publications

Events

Talks and Posters

2026:

Ebrar Beşinci, Timo Buchholz, Robin Edds, Ilaria Frana, James Griffiths, & Paula Menéndez Benito (2026, October 15-16). Bias in negated Italian questions with discourse particles and prosodic prominence [Conference presentation]. Linguistic Evidence 2026, Mannheim, Germany. (In collaboration with B5).

Ebrar Beşinci, Timo Buchholz, Robin Edds, Ilaria Frana, James Griffiths, & Paula Menéndez Benito (2026, September 24-25). Bias in negated Italian questions with discourse particles and prosodic prominence [Conference presentation]. 6th Experimental Pragmatics Conference in Italy, Genoa, Italy. (In collaboration with B5).

Ebrar Beşinci, Timo Buchholz, Robin Edds, Ilaria Frana, James Griffiths, & Paula Menéndez Benito (2026, April 29-30). Bias in negated Italian questions with discourse particles and prosodic prominence [Workshop presentation]. Polar Questions Across Languages 3, Göttingen, Germany. (In collaboration with B5).

Ebrar Beşinci, Timo Buchholz, Robin Edds, Ilaria Frana, James Griffiths, & Paula Menéndez Benito (2026, April 23-24). Bias in negated (Campania) Italian questions with discourse particles and prosodic prominence [Conference presentation]. 4th International Conference Prominence in Language, Cologne, Germany. (In collaboration with B5).