Chapter 9. Variation of evidential values in discourse domains

This paper examines the variation of evidential values in oral conversation and written journalistic discourse in English and Spanish. The study focuses on indirect inferential and reportative values of evidentiality, and on the multifunctionality of a number of evidential expressions derived from the perceptual, conceptual and communicative experiential domains. The paper presents results of a contrastive corpus-based study on the expression of evidentiality, and on the multifunctionality of core evidential expressions (verbs and sentence adverbs). It is argued that variation in the use of particular values of evidentiality is sensitive to discourse domains and genres, and that multifunctionality would appear to favour expressions derived from the perceptual domain.