Epistemic comparatives and other expressions of speaker’s uncertainty

Our study endeavors to further our understanding of the ways the speaker’s perspective is expressed in natural language. We analyze a rarely discussed construction, namely epistemic comparatives (ECs) and their interaction with inferential indirect evidentials (IIEs) and epistemic modals. We show that ECs are incompatible with IIEs, but are well-formed with epistemic modals. We base our discussion on data from Bulgarian and we also show that similar facts hold in Romanian, thus strengthening the empirical coverage. On the theoretical side, we claim that IIEs are structurally distinguished from epistemic modals. This accounts for their different behavior with ECs, thus providing further support to accounts which take indirect evidentials and epistemic modals to be separate categories.