Le modal italien <i>dovere</i> au conditionnel: évidentialité et contraintes sur l’inférence des relations de discours argumentatives

This paper proposes a semantic analysis of the "epistemic" interpretations of the Italian modal verb <i>dovere</i> with the conditional tense, taking as a starting point the underspecified modal semantics of both the modal verb and the conditional form. The analysis focuses in particular on the difference between epistemic readings of <i>dovere</i> in the indicative and conditional moods. We observe a number of constraints imposed by the "epistemic" reading of the conditional form of <i>dovere</i> over argumentative sequences in discourse, which are not imposed by the indicative form. On this basis, we suggest that the "epistemic" reading with the conditional emerges as a pragmatic free enrichment after alethic or deontic saturation of the modal basis of <i>dovere</i> in a hypothetical frame, whereas with the indicative, the modal saturation is truly doxastic, implying a metarepresentation of speaker’s beliefs, and thus transforming <i>dovere</i> into an evidential for the concerned inference.