Representation of indirect evidentiality through the evasion strategy in the English, Russian, and Chuvash languages

This study conducts a contrastive typological analysis of linguistic markers of author’s and impersonal evidentiality in the English, Russian, and Chuvash languages. The research novelty lies in the systematic analysis of Chuvash indirect evidentiality markers in a comparative perspective. The study demonstrates that the “Nominative Case with Infinitive” construction, as a characteristic of author’s evidentiality in English, corresponds to Russian modal-suppositional and comparative particles, introductory words, and phrases (equivalent to the degree of certainty adverb “perhaps”), which express the speaker’s low assessment of the reported information’s reliability. In Russian, evidential particles, introductory words, and sentences (equivalent to the hearsay adverb “allegedly”) are used to indicate an unreliable source. The evidential particle “якобы” and the introductory word “мол” are common in speeches and statements. This approach to classifying evidentiality systems is also applicable to Chuvash. Modals, introductory words, and modal verb forms serve as lexical means of expressing author’s and impersonal evidentiality. The standard is to use two modal formants simultaneously. However, unlike English and Russian, evidentiality representations with negative meaning can be complex grammatical units represented by verbal analytical constructions. The findings suggest both universal and language-specific means of representing indirect evidentiality. Correlated representation of evidentiality and epistemic modality plays a significant semantic-pragmatic role in utterances as an effective evasion strategy.