Evolution with an attitude: the grammaticalisation of epistemic/evidential verbs in Australian English

Across Englishes, frequently used epistemic/evidential complement-taking predicates ( e/e ctp s) have undergone conventionalisation, whereby subject + e/e verb constructions are reanalysed as formulaic stance markers. However, the system of e/e ctp s in Australian English (AusE) – and the degree to which they have grammaticalised – remains unexplored. In this article, we offer a quantitative analysis of the most frequent e/e ctp s in the spoken portion of the International Corpus of English – Australia . Multivariate analysis shows that think and guess stand as canonical encoders of speaker attitude, and reckon is multifunctional, encoding epistemic modality and evidentiality. Assuming that (inter-)subjective meaning represents the last stage in semantic change, our results indicate that AusE reckon is less grammaticalised than think and guess .