КОСВЕНИ ЕВИДЕНЦИАЛИ И СТЕПЕНИ НА ДОСТОВЕРНОСТ (ВЪРХУ МАТЕРИАЛ ОТ БЪЛГАРСКИЯ ЕЗИК)
INDIRECT EVIDENTIALS AND DEGREES OF RELIABILITY (ON DATA FROM BULGARIAN)

Summary/Abstract: The paper presents the results of an experimental study on the evaluations of the reliability of utterances, which consist of different evidential forms in Bulgarian. The total number of respondents is 171, aged 20 – 25. All of them are Arts and Humanities students who participated in the experiment before studying the evidential forms at university level. The structure of the experiment bears similarities to the one conducted by St. Fitneva (Fitneva 2001), however, the theoretical principles applied in the two studies are different, which leads to a sharp distinction in both the experimental materials used and the results of the gathered data. The empirical data of the study presented here evidences that the respondents’ evaluations of speech utterances reliability correspond closely to the semantic nature of the evidential forms. One of the most important results of the experiment is that there is no subordinate relationship between the conclusive and the renarrative forms in the Bulgarian language. Given that the paper also advocates that the empirical data is absolutely in line with the theoretical view that any hierarchy between the two features, ‘subjectivity’ and ‘renarration’, can hardly be seen: any existing difference in the frequency of the conclusive and the renarrative forms could easily be examined. The results of the experiment also show that there is a similar distance of reliability between the three indirect evidential forms.

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