Reviewed by Sharbani Banerji, Ghaziabad, India
Italian does not have a well-defined class of morphologically or syntactically marked forms to express modality, such as the English modals. However, through a rigorous diachronic analysis of the Italian epistemic system, Paola Pietrandrea demonstrates that metapropositionality in Italian affects ‘the aspectual semantics of propositional content, which can only be aspectually incomplete’ (209).
Ch. 1, ‘The notional category of epistemic modality’ (6–39), separates epistemic modality from other categories such as deontic modality, mood, illocution, reality status, and evidentiality and defines modality as ‘the performative category expressing the speaker’s genuine opinion towards the modalized proposition’ (39).
In Ch. 2, ‘A typological classification of epistemic systems’ (40–52), five parameters are identified for a typological classification of epistemic systems.
Ch. 3, ‘Epistemic modality in Italian’ (53–68), demonstrates that the epistemic future, the indicative, and the conditional (as well as the subjunctive, in subordinate clauses) forms of the modal verbs dovere ‘must’ and potere ‘can’ are identified as grammaticalized epistemic forms in Italian.
Ch. 4, ‘Semantic oppositions’ (69–99), provides a semantic analysis of Italian epistemic forms. The epistemic future emerges as the genuine epistemic form, unmarked to the degree of certainty. Deve is an epistemic-evidential form that marks a strong degree of certainty and nonmediated evidence, dovrebbe is an epistemic-evidential form that marks a medium degree of certainty and mediated evidence, può is primarily a deontic form, and potrebbe is the epistemic counterpart of può.
In Ch. 5, ‘A typological characterization of Italian epistemic modality’ (100–107), Italian is characterized as a language that (i) does not have specific forms dedicated to the expression of epistemic modality; (ii) distinguishes three degrees of certainty (i.e. strong, medium, and weak); (iii) distinguishes between genuine epistemicity and inferential evidentiality; (iv) displays a complex interaction between evidentiality and epistemicity; and (v) has low performativity.
Ch. 6, ‘Inflectional and distributional constraints: The (low) performativity of Italian epistemic modality’ (108–32), examines to what extent the morphosyntactic behavior of Italian epistemic forms obeys constraints on tense, personal inflection, and distribution, such as their occurrence in the protasis of conditional constructions and in interrogatives.
Ch. 7, ‘Aspectual constraints on the propositional content’ (133–53), argues that the only propositions that allow epistemic modalizations are those that display stative, progressive, habitual, or perfect predicates. Thus, incompleteness is an aspectual feature shared by all epistemically modalized predicates and, furthermore, all ‘predicates occurring in epistemically modalized propositions can be represented as intervals open to the right’ (153).
Ch. 8, ‘The incompleteness of the propositional content and the meta-propositionality of epistemic modality’ (154–86), demonstrates that the aspectual incompleteness that characterizes epistemically modalized propositions is an index of their propositional character. The converse also holds true: Aspectual completeness characterizes the complements of predicational predicates.
Ch. 9, ‘A diachronic hypothesis’ (187–206), puts forward a reconstructivist diachronic hypothesis concerning the rise of epistemic meanings in Italian. The little historical evidence available shows that, whereas aspectually complete predications are not susceptible to reanalysis, aspectually incomplete propositions are. The ‘Conclusions’ (207–09) summarizes the work.