Credo (I Believe): Epistemicity and the syntactic representation of

In this paper we consider the dependencies in Italian from forms such as credo (I believe) and dicono (they say). The main focus will be on credo, and only at the end of the discussion we will extend the analysis to cover dicono as well. Credo (I believe) is the subject-less first person present tense verbal form of the epistemic verb credere (to believe). Dicono (they say) is the subject-less third person plural present tense verbal form of the verb dire. These verbal forms can be followed by a subordinate clause. However, under certain circumstances – for instance in Complementizer Deletion structures – the (apparently) embedded clause exhibits several properties typical of main clauses, which are incompatible with the syntax of subordinate sentences. Moreover, in these cases, from the semantic point of view, both the main verbal form and the alleged complement clause present some peculiarities, which call for an explanation. We will argue that the sequence consisting of credo or dicono followed by a complementizer-less clause should often be seen as a mono-clausal structure and that credo (I believe) and dicono (they say) are better treated as heads occupying functional projections, expressing an epistemic and an evidential value respectively.