Reported lies: Incredulous evidentiality and speaker's commitment

This paper discusses a particular case of reported speech in contemporary French, namely texts where the speaker reports lies s/he has been told, presenting them as lies. Evidentiality in the broad sense is strongly present. This kind of evidentiality will be called 'incredulous evidentiality'. In fact, incredulous evidentiality includes not only reported lies but all cases in which the speaker reports information s/he believes is not true, and reported lies form one of its subtypes. I will briefly describe the reportative mechanisms of this particular kind of texts and secondly discuss the speaker's commitment. In reportative evidentiality the speaker commits her/himself at least partially to the propositional content; in contrast to this, in incredulous evidentiality the speaker does not only distance him/herself from the propositional content of the reported speech but even denies it and thus commits him/herself to its untruthfulness. Incredulous evidential discourse must thus be considered a category on its own. The texts under investigation are found on the internet, most commonly in different kinds of discussion forums.