This study adopts a context-sensitive and functional approach to the qualitative analysis of Spanish linguistic means that are used to convey evidential meanings. Verbs of cognitive attitude, modal adverbs, modal verbs, the Spanish conditional and the synthetic future are analysed against the background of pragmatics. GlossaNet, a search engine that supports the researcher to build a corpus, was used to collect the examples analysed in this study. Furthermore, as evidentiality is at least in Spanish a linguistic category that overlaps with other semantic-functional categories, namely...

This book is concerned with the diachronic development of selected topic and focus markers in Spanish, Portuguese and French. On the one hand, it focuses on the development of these structures from their relational meaning to their topic-/ focus-marking meaning, and on the other hand, it is concerned with their current form und use. Thus, Romance topic and focus markers - such as sp. en cuanto a, pt. a proposito de, fr. au niveau de or sentence-initial sp. Lo que as well as clefts and pseudo-clefts - are investigated from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. The author argues that...