On the Evidential Status of Presupposition and Assertion

Abstract

This work tackles the evidential behavior of presuppositions and assertions by assessing their socio-interactional function in communication. It is argued that by asserting and presupposing contents in an utterance, speakers encode a personal experience and a factual type of evidentiality, respectively, the former entailing a stronger involvement of the speaker as committed source of some information. By discussing how evidential meanings can also be pragmatically-inferred, the present paper proposes to recast the presupposition-assertion distinction as a further level of evidentiality marking.