The development and functions of the inferential marker chog‘i in Uzbek

Abstract

In the evidential system of Uzbek, the speaker has different grammatical options in marking the source of information, such as -ibdi, ekan, emish, etc., although it is not compulsory to mark this category in the utterance. In addition to these established markers, new markers have developed into evidentials, and they encode specific sub-categories of evidentiality. In this study, after a brief overview of grammatical markers of evidentiality in Uzbek, the marker chog‘i is examined with a syntactic and semantic approach based on a corpus of selected texts. Its development into an inferential marker is evaluated with special attention to sources of evidentials.