Epistemic verbs in Scandinavian languages
Résumé
The aim of this chapter is to examine (i) if and how some properties deemed typical of epistemic verbs in first-person contexts carry over to second-person contexts, and (ii) if different paths of pragmatic specialization can be identified for first- and second-person epistemic verbs. This contribution is intended as a pilot study, based on a set of opinion verbs in three neighbouring languages: Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. Using frequency data from the TenTen familiy of corpora, I show that there is indeed a massive flip from almost exclusively declarative contexts in the first person singular towards a large share of interrogative contexts in the second person, which is consistent with previous findings on the “interrogative flip” in the typological literature. Many other features of epistemic verbs, including their much-discussed “parentheticality”, seem to be lexically-driven, with each verb displaying its own statistical preferences and person not being a major factor in variation. In all three languages, the cognates of English think, which display a larger range of non-experiential uses than other epistemic verbs, also behave differently with respect to grammatical person. Their deictic-epistemic properties are less significant. On the other hand, these verbs also give rise to the most solid examples of pragmaticalization in the second person, in a specific slot, the utterance-final position, which corroborates a secondary expectation of the study, as to the topological specialization of subjective, first-person epistemic verbs vs intersubjective-second person epistemic verbs.
