The Pathway from Taste to Epistemic Flavors: Modal Semantics of Italian mi sa

In (colloquial) Italian, the fixed expression mi sa functions as an evidential/epistemic marker, requiring the dative 1SG clitic experiencer and the 3SG default form of the verb sapere. Mi sa diachronically develops from the verb for taste/smell, sapere, which is still productive in contemporary Italian, and the structure that it projects. This comprises an obligatory PP introduced by di encoding the type/quality of taste/smell (often metaphorically extended); a subject expressing the perceived entity; and an optional dative experiencer. We systematically analyzed data from the KIParla corpus, comparing the distribution of mi sa to the distribution of one of the most frequent Italian epistemic verb forms, namely, credo ‘I believe’. This study aimed to establish how the original perceptual meaning of mi sa influences its epistemic meaning. The results suggest that the persistence of the original object-oriented perception verb makes mi sa more likely to appear in particular contexts, i.e., events/situations that are known by the speaker through an inferential-like process. Furthermore, mi sa can only rarely be uttered out of the blue and seems to need a situative context (a stage), often containing an explicit QUD.