摘要：Although the papers by de Haan (2010) and Boye (2010) approach their topic from different perspectives, they essentially address the same issue: the relationship between epistemic modality and evidentiality. They differ in a number of details, such as de Haan's emphasis on ¨Dbottom-up¡¬ procedure, which Boye assumes only implicitly, and the fact that de Haan accepts the idea of overlap between epistemic modality and evidentiality proposed by van der Auwera and Plungian (1998), while Boye rejects it. Nevertheless, they both essentially come to the same conclusion, namely that there is no ¨Dabsolutely¡¬ correct answer to the question of categorial relationship between the two categories. This relationship ultimately depends on the choice of definition by the scholar¡ªa definition that should observe, however, the criterion of contiguity of meaning (or of subcategories) as represented on a semantic map. That is, representation on a semantic map serves to illustrate that the category as it is defined is a coherent one. Both papers are very welcome contributions to a relatively hot topic. Judgments on the relationship between the two categories have often not been very well-founded. As Boye poignantly notes, the currently most authoritative book on evidentiality (Aikhenvald 2004), for example, strongly claims a strict separation between evidentiality and epistemic modality without actually providing arguments in favor of this claim. Thus, in my view, both of the papers constitute an advance in the overall discussion. At the heart of the evidentiality vs. epistemic modality discussion, however, whether or not explicitly stated, often lies the question of how to categorize modal markers such as English must in Indo-European languages. They have been labeled as .epistemic' for a long time, whereas in the past couple of years some scholars have started to reconceptualize them as .evidentials'. In my comments on de Haan's paper here, this question, which always looms in the background of the epistemic modality/evidentiality debate, will be a central concern. I also intend to address a number of issues in the paper which I feel call for clarification, perhaps in a future publication where the author has more space to explain his reasoning
