The evidential future in Italian

Abstract

AbstractThis paper provides a systematic description and analysis of the non-predictive use of the Italian future. Several authors claim that, on this use, the Italian future is an evidential (Squartini 2001, Mari 2010, Eckardt and Beltrama 2019, Frana and Menéndez-Benito 2019). Others argue that the non-predictive future does not directly contribute an evidential signal (e.g., Giannakidou and Mari 2018, Farkas and Ippolito 2022). We side with the evidential camp. From an empirical standpoint, we present the results of a battery of tests that show that the non-predictive future patterns with evidentials cross-linguistically. From a theoretical standpoint, we put forward an analysis that combines a slightly modified version of the proposal for evidentials in Davis et al. (2007) with Schlenker’s (2007) view of expressive content. On this account, the Italian evidential future (i) lowers the quality threshold required to perform a successful speech act (Davis et al. 2007) and (ii) triggers an evidential presupposition relativized to the speaker’s beliefs (modeled after Schlenker’s analysis of expressives). Our treatment of the evidential component as an expressive presupposition opens up a new perspective on the study of evidentiality and highlights the need for further detailed empirical studies exploring the extent to which this perspective is applicable cross-linguistically.