The Role of prosody in the encoding of evidentiality

Abstract

The overarching goal of this paper is to advance on the understanding of how evidential meanings are expressed in natural languages. Specifically, we aimed to investigate what type of meaning was encoded in yes-no questions through the combination of the question particle (QP) que ‘that’ and the nuclear intonational pattern L+H* L% in Majorcan Catalan yes-no questions (i.e., Que és un llibre?L+H* L% ‘QP-It’s a book?’), and to understand any temporal information that might be encoded through this construction. Several complementary research methods were used to address our question: the Discourse Completion Task, an acceptability task and a multiple-choice questionnaire. The results show that three types of information are encoded in QP que_L+H* L% questions: sentence modality, inference based on direct evidence and immediacy of the evidence.