'Dizque' in Mexican Spanish: the subjectification of reportative meaning

In a number of American dialects, among which Mexican Spanish,
dizque (literally: ‘s/he says that’) functions as an adverbial expression of
reportative evidentiality, i.e. it expresses an objective distance between the
speaker and the content she/he communicates. At the same time, the use
of dizque tends to create an implicature of subjective distance between the
speaker and the communicated content in the sense that marking a given
content, or part of it, as being second-hand information, may be interpreted
as an indication that the speaker doubts the reliability of this information. In
other words, the use of the evidential lexical item tends to imply an epistemic
modal meaning. As regards its syntax, dizque has a remarkable flexibility,
since it functions at various levels of the utterance: it may modify a main or
a subordinate clause, a nominal or an adverbial constituent and all kinds of
predicates. The aim of the present paper is to show that there is a relation
between the scope of dizque and the implicature of a negative speaker attitude,
such that when the scope of dizque decreases, this implicature becomes
increasingly prominent, even to such a degree that it may become part of the
meaning of dizque. In other words, the degree of subjectification of the meaning
of dizque is inversely proportional to its scope. As such, the case of dizque
is a counterexample to the common view according to which subjectification is
tied not to a decrease, but rather to an increase in scope.