Epistemic comparatives and other expressions of speaker’s uncertainty

Our study endeavors to further our understanding of the ways the speaker’s perspective
is expressed in natural language. We analyze a rarely discussed construction,
namely epistemic comparatives (ECs) and their interaction with inferential
indirect evidentials (IIEs) and epistemic modals. We show that ECs are incompatible
with IIEs, but are well-formed with epistemic modals. We base our discussion
on data from Bulgarian and we also show that similar facts hold in Romanian, thus
strengthening the empirical coverage. On the theoretical side, we claim that IIEs
are structurally distinguished from epistemic modals. This accounts for their different
behavior with ECs, thus providing further support to accounts which take
indirect evidentials and epistemic modals to be separate categories.