Uttering evidentials without evidence

Epistemic modals are uncontroversially assumed to have an inherent evidential component of NON-DIRECT evidence (von Fintel and Gillies 2010, a.o.). This assumption entails the following: (i) epistemic modals should be infelicitous in evidence-neutral contexts, (ii) and they should be infelicitous in contexts with DIRECT perceptual evidence (including trustworthy reports). This paper will engage with the first prediction, and provide empirical basis for the claim that epistemic modals can and do appear in certain neutral contexts cross-linguistically. An analysis is provided centered around the epistemic modal base, where an additional ordering source is shown to yield non-evidential readings of epistemic modals, thus arguing that discourse goals can affect formal representations of modality.