A manifestação verbal da evidencialidade nas variedades faladas do português africano contemporâneo

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze functional and formal properties that characterize the verbal manifestation of evidentiality in the contemporary African Portuguese spoken varieties, considering it as an important functional domain responsible for the expression of source of information, whose linguistic manifestation is motivated by contextual, social, cognitive and discursive factors. For this, we considered 20 textual samples of Portuguese spoken in Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique and Sao Tome and Principe, compiled in the Corpus of Portuguese Spoken-Geographical and Social Varieties. The results revealed that (a) there is a predominance of the lexical expression of evidentiality by means of inference verbs followed by the strategy of reportive evidentiality, used as a cohesive resource by the speaker to resume a content communicated in another moment of his speech; (b) the speaker is the source of the information, elaborating his inference based on accumulated knowledge or based on some available evidence.