Modal and evidential strategies for future anterior in European languages: Questionnaire and corpus data

The paper is dedicated to the semantics of future anterior with reference to the past in European languages. The study is based on the data from parallel corpora and on the questionnaire. Data from several European languages, such as Romance (French, Italian and Romanian), German, Baltic (Lithuanian and Latvian), Balkan Slavic (Bulgarian, Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian and its Čakavian dialect), Greek and Albanian, are taken into account. As a result, a wide range of different modal-evidential strategies of future anterior was identifi ed, namely presumptive, inferential, ignorative, endophoric and unconscious, mirative and dubitative. They all develop from the epistemic source, viz. from the ability of the future anterior to express epistemic distance. It is more typical for the future anterior to be used as a marker of personal indirect evidence in presumptive, inferential, unconscious and endophoric contexts, but less typical in mirative and dubitative contexts.