How to disambiguate an evidential construct? Taxonomy and compositionality of Romanian verbal complexes with evidential semantics

This paper examines a specific verbal paradigm with evidential interpretations in Romanian; it also addresses intriguing questions about compositionality in the evidential domain and the precise delimita- tion of this notion from other (modal) categories.The discussion is centered around a typical characteris- tic of evidentials about the past, namely that they are homophonous with the perfect counterfactuals and future perfects. A battery of tests is examined in detail, and it is demonstrated that evidentials are not pragmatic extensions of homophonous forms; they rather have to be considered independent entries in the database.