Evidentiality as Conversational Implicature: Implications for Corpus Annotation

This paper discusses a number of issues involved in the annotation of evidentiality communicated as a conversational implicature in authentic written texts. As a pilot experiment, evidentials were annotated separately by two experts in sample texts from the MULTINOT corpus, which consists of English and Spanish comparable and parallel texts from different registers. The results of this annotation proved that 1) evidentiality in English is most often expressed by pragmatic means, and 2) these means easily provoked interannotator disagreement. Some types of these pragmatic evidentials are specified, together with the implications for the design of an annotation system for evidentiality.