L’emploi évidentiel de volo chez Cicéron : contiguïté métonymique entre « vouloir », « penser » et « dire »

This contribution highlights that the Latin verb volo ‘to want’, in the third person, exhibits rare evidential uses, introducing an oral or written statement of another, absent, speaker or writer, who constitues the source of the information. It illustrates the evidential use of the present indicative forms vult/volt (‘he/she wants’) and volunt (‘they want’) in Cicero’s works, where the earliest attestations of this grammaticalization phenomenon appear. The Latin data reveal a continuity between the notions of WANTING and THINKING, as volo can be used to refer to someone else's thoughts, as well as between THINKING and SAYING. We analyse these findings from a cognitive perspective, shedding light on the metonymic contiguity of the three notions.