Acknowledgements -- List of figures -- List of tables -- List of abbreviations -- 1. Preliminaries -- 1.1. Introduction -- 1.2. Overview of the book -- 1.3. Theoretical basis -- 1.3.1. Central assumptions -- 1.3.2. Crosslinguistic descriptive categories -- 1.4. Empirical basis -- 1.5. The term epistemic in linguistics and philosophy -- 1.6. Epistemic meanings and notions -- 1.6.1. Evidential meanings and notions -- 1.6.2. Epistemic modal meanings and notions -- 1.6.3. Non-epistemic meanings and notions occasionally considered epistemic in the literature -- 1.6.4. Overview of epistemic meanings and notions -- 1.7. Precursors of the category of epistemicity -- 1.7.1. Epistemic meaning variants -- 1.7.2. Epistemic stance -- 1.7.3. Language-specific groups of epistemic expressions -- 1.7.4. The descriptive category of status -- 1.7.5. Epistemic scales -- 1.8. Summary of Chapter 1 -- 2. Epistemic systems -- 2.1. Introduction -- 2.1.1. Morphosyntactic systems -- 2.1.2. The argument -- 2.1.3. Overview of Chapter 2 -- 2.2. General epistemic systems across languages -- 2.2.1. General epistemic systems in American languages -- 2.2.2. General epistemic systems in non-American languages -- 2.2.3. Evidential subsystems with epistemic modal extensions as general epistemic systems -- 2.2.4. Other possible instances of general epistemic systems -- 2.3. Epistemic subsystems across languages -- 2.3.1. Evidential systems across languages -- 2.3.2. Epistemic modal systems across languages -- 2.3.3. Epistemic extensions of narrow-sense modal systems -- 2.4. Several epistemic systems in one and the same language -- 2.5. Epistemic expressions as a universal phenomenon -- 2.5.1. Scattered coding of epistemic meaning -- 2.5.2. Lexical coding of epistemic meaning -- 2.6. Summary of Chapter 2.

3. A semantic map of epistemic expressions -- 3.1. Introduction -- 3.1.1. Semantic mapping -- 3.1.2. The argument -- 3.1.3. Overview of Chapter 3 -- 3.2. The map -- 3.3. The crosslinguistic significance of the notional distinctions found in the map -- 3.3.1. The distinction between direct and indirect justification -- 3.3.2. The distinction between full, partial and neutral support -- 3.3.3. The distinction between evidential and epistemic modal notions -- 3.4. The crosslinguistic significance of the connecting lines found in the map -- 3.4.1. Connecting line 1: The link between direct and indirect justification -- 3.4.2. Connecting line 2: The link between full and partial support -- 3.4.3. Connecting line 3: The link between partial and neutral support -- 3.4.4. Connecting line 4: The link between direct justification and full support -- 3.4.5. Connecting line 5: The link between indirect justification and partial support -- 3.5. How to falsify the proposed semantic map of epistemic expressions -- 3.6. The structure of the semantic map of epistemic expressions -- 3.6.1. The epistemic modal scale -- 3.6.2. The evidential reliability scale -- 3.6.3. The relation between the epistemic modal scale and the evidential scale -- 3.7. Related semantic maps -- 3.7.1. Anderson's (1986) map of evidentiality -- 3.7.2. Van der Auwera and Plungian's (1998) map of narrow-sense modality -- 3.8. The asymmetry of the semantic map with respect to coding potential -- 3.8.1. Zero-coding potential -- 3.8.2. Dependencies between zero-coding potentials -- 3.9. Summary of Chapter 3 -- 4. Epistemic meaning and scope -- 4.1. Introduction -- 4.1.1. Scope -- 4.1.2. The argument -- 4.1.3. Overview of Chapter 4 -- 4.2. The scope of epistemic meaning -- 4.2.1. Speech acts, propositions and states-of-affairs.

4.2.2. Epistemic meaning and the proposition -- 4.3. The distribution of epistemic expressions among different clause types -- 4.3.1. Distribution among different types of independent clauses -- 4.3.2. Distribution among different types of dependent clauses -- 4.3.3. Epistemic expressions disambiguate polyfunctional clauses as propositional -- 4.3.4. Propositional clauses disambiguate polyfunctional expressions as epistemic -- 4.4. The position of grammatical epistemic expressions in a universal ordering of grammatical expressions -- 4.4.1. A universal ordering of grammatical tense, epistemic and illocutionary expressions -- 4.4.2. The ordering of grammatical epistemic expressions relative to other grammatical expressions -- 4.4.3. The ordering of co-occurring grammatical epistemic expressions relative to each other -- 4.4.4. The ordering of grammatical epistemic expressions and the propositional scope of epistemic meanings -- 4.5. Less than one propositional expression per epistemic expression -- 4.5.1. Epistemic expressions without propositional expressions -- 4.5.2. More than one epistemic expression per propositional expression -- 4.6. Summary of Chapter 4 -- 5. A functional-cognitive analysis of epistemic meaning and the proposition -- 5.1. Introduction -- 5.1.1. Definitions of epistemic, evidential and epistemic modal meaning -- 5.1.2. Overview of Chapter 5 -- 5.2. A functional-cognitive analysis of the proposition -- 5.2.1. The proposition as a referring meaning unit -- 5.2.2. The proposition as a linguistic prompt to evoke a Langackerian process construed as referring -- 5.2.3. Arguments in support of the proposed functional-cognitive analysis -- 5.2.4. Reference and truth value -- 5.3. A functional-cognitive analysis of epistemic meaning.

5.3.1. Epistemic meaning as a linguistic prompt to evoke a conceptual justificatory-support structure -- 5.3.2. Epistemic meaning as a survival skill -- 5.4. Relating the functional-cognitive analysis to the crosslinguistic data -- 5.4.1. Conceptual coherence and epistemic systems -- 5.4.2. Conceptual coherence and the semantic map of epistemic expressions -- 5.4.3. Conceptual dependence and the propositional scope of epistemic meanings -- 5.4.4. Functional dependence and propositions without epistemic expressions -- 5.5. Summary -- 6 Conclusion -- References -- Language index -- Subject index.