PARTICLES, PARENTHETICALS, CONJUNCTIONS AND PREPOSITIONS AS EVIDENTIALITY MARKERS IN CONTEMPORARY POLISH (A FIRST EXPLORATORY STUDY)

This article undertakes to delimit the domain of evidentiality by setting it apart from epistemic modality (while simultaneously showing systematic cross-cuts with it). For this purpose the author takes advantage of recent typological work that has been dealing with grammatical evidentiality markers. However, the main aim of this article consists in a first inventorization of lexical markers of reportive and inferentive evidentiality used in contemporary standard Polish. The analysis is based on data from electronic corpora, only to a minor extent on examples discussed in the linguistic literature. The analysis takes into consideration some equivalent units in Russian and English. The format of the semantic explications is based on Natural Semantic Metalanguage and follows Wierzbicka (2006).