An analysis of disagreement-provoking factors in the analysis of epistemic modality and evidentiality: the case of English adverbials
Paper · 2013 · Marta Carretero and Juan Rafael Zamorano-Mansilla
Summary
The paper investigates why trained linguists disagree when deciding whether an English adverbial carries epistemic or evidential meaning. It is part of the CONTRANOT project, which builds English–Spanish contrastive descriptions for corpus annotation. The authors, who were also the two annotators, took 20 random occurrences of each of a set of adverbials from the BYU version of the British National Corpus. The adverbials covered probability (perhaps, maybe, in all likelihood), certainty (certainly, undeniably) and evidence (apparently, clearly, obviously). Each occurrence received a simple binary label, Epistemic/Non-epistemic or Evidential/Non-evidential, using strictly semantic criteria. Pragmatic uses, such as softening or strengthening assertiveness, and concessive discourse functions were set aside beforehand as distractors. The analysis is mostly qualitative. It identifies syntactic factors (interrogatives, clausal scope) and semantic factors that caused disagreement. The semantic factors include generic statements, overlaps with dynamic modality and manner, the evidential–epistemic relation, and co-occurring hedging words. For each factor the authors fix an annotation rule. The resulting guidelines are meant to raise agreement among experts and later among non-expert annotators.
Key points
- The adverbial inventory has three groups: 10 of probability/possibility, 7 of certainty, and 5 evidential. impossibly was dropped because it showed almost no epistemic meaning.
- All evidential adverbials except apparently also imply high certainty ("epistentials"). Even so, any adverbial with an evidence component is tagged only as evidential.
- Generic statements, where maybe or possibly reads like "sometimes", explained most disagreements for possibly (5 cases) and conceivably (6). perhaps and maybe in these contexts are tagged epistemic. possibly, conceivably and however improbably are tagged as an epistemic–dynamic merger.
- apparently was tagged evidential unanimously except in two cases. The rule is now to always tag it evidential. Its sense of uncertainty is treated as a Generalized Conversational Implicature that can be cancelled.
- clearly and plainly sometimes blur evidential and manner readings (one disagreement each). These are tagged evidential whenever the paraphrase "it is clear/plain that…" works.
Interesting ideas
- I1. Before annotating, list the pragmatic distractors (downtoning, emphasis, concession) and explicitly rule them out, so annotators judge only the core semantic category.
- I2. Use a paraphrase test as the decision rule: if "it is clear that…" fits, the reading is evidential; if "sometimes" fits, the reading leans dynamic/generic.
- I3. Decide uncertain cases by an adverb's overall meaning profile rather than the local context alone. For example, perhaps has no established dynamic sense, so it stays epistemic even in generic sentences.
- I4. Treat some meanings as default implicatures that can be cancelled. apparently signals evidence by default, and its uncertainty is withdrawn when the context shows the proposition is false.
- I5. Collect the cases that caused disagreement, attach a resolution to each, and fold them into the guidelines before scaling to new annotators.
For Mova
How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:
- I1 (frames): In crate prag, separate a modal adverb's truth-assessment from its speech-act softening or boosting, and store them as distinct, explainable features.
- I2 (frames): Encode the paraphrase checks as explicit, inspectable rules for labelling the modality of adverbs attached to a clause in the UD tree.
- I3 (world): Store per-lexeme default modality types in the compiled lexicon, so that ambiguous contexts fall back to the word's typical sense.
- I4 (world): When recording a proposition in the text world, keep evidential source fixed but let its certainty value be revised if later text contradicts it.
- I5 (learn): When witness parsers or LLM teachers disagree on silver data, cluster the conflicts by factor and turn each resolved cluster into a written rule or repair rule.
Institutions
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Cite
Cite as Marta Carretero and Juan Rafael Zamorano-Mansilla. 2013. An analysis of disagreement-provoking factors in the analysis of epistemic modality and evidentiality: the case of English adverbials. Proceedings of the IWCS 2013 Workshop on Annotation of Modal Meanings in Natural Language (WAMM).
@inproceedings{carretero2013analysis,
title = {{An analysis of disagreement-provoking factors in the analysis of epistemic modality and evidentiality: the case of English adverbials}},
author = {Marta Carretero and Juan Rafael Zamorano-Mansilla},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the IWCS 2013 Workshop on Annotation of Modal Meanings in Natural Language (WAMM)},
year = {2013},
url = {https://aclanthology.org/W13-0303/}
}References
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