Evidentiality in English and Polish

Abstract

This thesis provides a synchronic account of evidentiality in English and Polish and the main ideas associated with the research on evidentiality with reference to these languages. Chapter 1 provides the review of main ideas as presented in the literature on the topic. Linguists provide varied definitions of evidentiality, therefore chapter 2 gives a unified description of evidentiality, understood as an independent grammatical and semantic category, and offers an organised account of its semantic types and sub-types. Chapter 3 and 4 analyse evidentiality in English and Polish, respectively, describing various lexical items with evidential meaning. Chapter 5 addresses the issue of the relation between evidentiality and other grammatical categories, while the final chapter looks at the correlation between evidentiality and epistemic modality.