The focus in the spread of morphological evidentiality in Peninsular Spanish can be located in western Spain. From that area, the resource of morphological evidentiality has gradually diffused throughout all of Peninsular Spanish, as well as European Portuguese, Galician and much of Catalan. The generalisation of evidentiality elsewhere has followed the same path: there is always an epicentre from which this strategy expands. This paper analyses the linguistic reasons that justify the birth of evidentiality in western Spain, and the importance that language contact has had in the extension of evidentials throughout the Iberian Peninsula and the whole Romance spectrum. The results show that evidentiality is either the result of ergative patterns or a feature adopted by contact.

The morphological future tense in the Romance languages can express time, modality and evidentiality. The literature states that almost all varieties use this tense to denote inference or conjecture, but the data researchers use is based on their own introspection, as well as on literary texts. In this paper, I attempt to give an account of the validity of the morphological future tense at the dialectal level in all Romance languages at the beginning of the 20th century in order to determine whether its conjectural value was indeed possible at that time and to what extent it can be concluded that Romance languages possess morphological evidentiality.