Pragmatics or morpho-syntax? The encoding of indirect evidentiality in Romanian

A central question about the encoding of evidential notions in human languages is whether they result from pragmatics or can be read off morpho-syntax. This paper addresses some challenges posed by a particular verbal paradigm with evidential semantics in Romanian, the so-called presumptive mood. The gist of the proposed analysis is that a syntactic derivation makes better predictions for this class than a purely pragmatic explanation.