Studies on evidentiality marking in West and South Slavic

The present volume assembles six studies on the marking of evidential functions in Serbian (J. Cudomirovic, Lj. Popovic), Slovak (M. Ivanova) and Polish (A. Socka, P. Yildiz, B. Wiemer); four of them (plus an Introduction) are written in English, with a further article in Russian and German, respectively. The focus for the West Slavic languages is on sentential adverbs and so-called function words (particles, complementizers, etc.; M. Ivanova, A. Socka, P. Yildiz, B. Wiemer), as well as on the roots of evidential marking appearing in clause-combining with perception or seem-verbs in Polish (P. Yildiz) or Serbian (J. Cudomirovic), for which different degrees of conventionalization are discussed. One article, however, additionally targets evidential extensions of past tense paradigms in Serbian (Lj. Popovic), for which an analysis of a questionnaire survey is presented. All articles, with one exception, take a synchronic view of the aforementioned contemporary languages, mostly on the basis of corpus data. One study deals with early, pre-evidential stages in the development of the Polish comparison marker jakoby ‘as if’ (B. Wiemer). The interaction with, and relation to, epistemic meanings is accounted for in all the studies, but it is specifically focused on in two papers on Polish (P. Yildiz, B. Wiemer). A third paper on Polish (A. Socka) arrives at new conclusions concerning ‘distance’ from a discourse perspective, partially conventionalized in the lexical meaning of reportive sentence adverbs (or particles).