Evidential participles and epistemic vigilance

Abstract

For communicated contents to be accepted by the audience, they have to pass the filters of epistemic vigilance mechanisms, which check the credibility and reliability of communicators and the information provided. Communicators may lack adequate evidence about the information they dispense. One of the ways to indicate to the audience that they are uncertain about some information (rather than to put their reputation as reliable speakers at risk) is to use participial adjectives, such as alleged or suspected. The chapter discusses the features of such adjectives and argues that they specialise for marking the speaker’s epistemic stance towards the information communicated – a function they share with other evidentials. Unlike many other expressions denoting epistemic stance, however, they appear to be confined in their scope to the noun phrase in which they occur.