Dependencies Between Evidentiality And Clausal Grammatical Categories
Abstract
Evidentiality, the grammatical expression of information sources, has long been studied as a distinct category but increasingly is seen as deeply interconnected with clausal grammatical categories such as tense, aspect, mood, and modality. In Uzbek, evidentiality is primarily marked by particles like ekan (inferred) and emish (reportative), rather than affixes, offering valuable insights into how evidential meaning aligns with typological and pragmatic structures. Despite extensive cross-linguistic research, the systematic interaction between Uzbek evidentials and clausal categories remains underexplored. This study investigates the structural, functional, and pragmatic dependencies of Uzbek evidentials on clausal categories, using comparative typology and corpus analysis. Analysis of 1,000 sentences from the Uzbek National Corpus revealed that ekan is most frequent in past and modal contexts (420 and 230 cases respectively), while emish dominates present contexts (400 cases). Evidentials consistently appear clause-finally, influencing discourse structure, stance-taking, and politeness strategies. Unlike languages with fully grammaticalized evidential systems, Uzbek demonstrates a unique reliance on pragmatic and syntactic cues, supporting a continuum model where evidentiality and modality overlap. The findings contribute to typological classification by illustrating how evidentiality functions within Turkic languages and highlight the pedagogical importance of teaching evidentials for second-language acquisition, where misuse can alter pragmatic intent. Ultimately, evidentiality in Uzbek is shown to be central to discourse management, reflecting both linguistic and sociocultural dimensions.
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