An analysis of disagreement-provoking factors in the analysis of epistemic modality and evidentiality: the case of English adverbials

摘要

This paper reports on a series of annotation experiments carried out on a number of English adverbials. The experiments, based on occurrences obtained from the British National Corpus, focused on the distinction of epistemic and evidential meanings from other kinds of meanings. The results led to the conclusion that many of the cases of inter-annotator disagreement were due to certain syntactic and semantic factors. Some of these factors will be described in detail, together with the decisions made in each case for prospective annotation.