Recent work in language and text has explored such broad functional categories as evidentiality and affect, and has examined their cross-linguistic occurrences and manifestations. This paper focuses on a single construction, explores its variations, and describes and explains its pragmatic and textual functions. This rare construction, exemplified by "It is that women in Ireland are not a form of prayer," occurs in several languages, denoting inferentiality, an aspect of evidentiality. (Contains 29 references.) (Author)

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