Epistemic modals and evidential parentheticals interact in language comprehension
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When talking about an event, speakers not only describe the event itself, but often also indicate the degree of commitment to what they said by either evaluating its likelihood (“Tom probably drank alcohol last night”) or providing the source of information (“According to what I heard, Tom drank alcohol last night”). Consequently, listeners need to form a mental representation of the event and adjust their commitment to the truth value of what they heard based on the epistemic modality and evidentiality in the input. We explored the interaction between epistemic modals and evidentials in language processing by examining a hypothesis that a parenthetical evidential functions like a hedge, pulling the epistemic strengths of the modals from more extreme positions to the middle ground.