Evidentiality and expression of evidence

[Alexander Letuchiy]

Dear typologists,
 
Many of us deal with evidentiality, which is marked grammatically, as in Bulgarian and Tariana. Sometimes the same semantic components (various types of source of information) are expressed with lexical units, such as English "allegedly" ('as smb. says'), which is semantically close to Aikhenvald's reported evidentiality.
 
I have a very concrete question concerning so-called inferred evidentiality - the type of evidentiality when our conclusion "is based on obvious evidence" [Aikhenvald 2004: 2] (for instance, if someone comes home very dirty and with a ball in his hand we suppose that he has played football).
 
Russian does not have grammatical marking of evidentiality, but some lexical units, such as "vidno", "poxozhe" and "kazhetsja" mark a meaning close to inferred evidentiality. In principle, all the three are applicable to the situation with football playing. But they are syntactically different.
 
"Vidno" is usually used when the piece of evidence is directly mentioned in the pre- or post-text - the most characteristic use is:
 
Vasinogo    m'acha     net,        vidno,    on       v          futbol        igraet
Vasja's       ball          no          VIDNO    he      in          football     plays
'Vasja's ball is missing, VIDNO he plays football.'    
 
In contrast, "kazhetsja" is better used when the piece of evidence is not directly used - in the example above it would be better to omit "Vasja's ball is missing" to use "kazhetsja".
 
"Poxozhe" can be used in the both type of sentences.
 
I would like to ask: do you observe something like that in your languages (both with grammatical evidentiality and lexical expression of evidential meaning? If yes, is there typological research where this problem would be analyzed?

Best regards,

Alexander Letuchiy, Moscow 		 	   		  
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