English Evidential –ly Adverbs in Main Clauses: A Functional Approach

Abstract

The present paper examines the distribution of English evidential -ly adverb in the scopal hierarchical framework that was presented by Hengeveld and Dall’Aglio Hattnher (2015) in their results of work on Brazilian grammatical evidentials. The analysis will constitute the categorization of eleven English evidential -ly adverb. The results will determine whether the analysis supports Hengeveld and Dall’Aglio Hattnher’s (2015) conclusion that evidential items with multiple meanings occur in adjacent positions within an FDG Level, and that they can occur on two Levels in the FDG framework. The data which was retrieved from recent UK newspaper articles in the BYU NOW corpus (News on the Web), comprise main clauses modified by an evidential -ly adverb. Categorization of the evidential adverbs in the FDG framework was determined by paraphrasing, and by applying diagnostic scope criteria. For the eleven evidential -ly adverbs studied, it is shown that non-reportative evidential adverbs with multiple meanings occur at adjacent FDG layers at the Representational Level, and that two adverbs occur at both the Interpersonal and the Representational Level.

Keywords

• evidentiality
• english -ly adverbs
• scope
• functional discourse grammar
• reportativity
• inference
• deduction
• event perception