Futuro y evidencialidad

Abstract

Future tenses are cross-linguistically problematic for various reasons: 1) they usually get a large number of different interpretations; 2) some of these readings do not carry a future time reference and, moreover, these are, by far, the most frequent ones; and 3) future time reference is successfully expressed by means of other tenses and verbal periphrases. Approaches to the meaning of the future in temporal and modal terms do not seem to be able to tackle these difficulties in an adequate way. The aim of this paper is to put forward a unified proposal for the meaning of the future in Spanish based on the notion of evidentiality. I will argue that, when the future is analysed as conveying an evidential meaning -more precisely, that the propositional content has as the only source-, the whole range of uses and interpretations can be easily accounted for, and the co-occurrence of other expressions to indicate futurity can also be accommodated within my proposal in a natural way.