Evidential strategies and grammatical marking in clauses governed by verba dicendi in B ulgarian (2022)

Abstract: Thе study explores the interaction between the participants in the communication process with respect to their knowledge about the situation presented in the utterance when transforming direct into indirect speech using a verbum dicendi. The speaker has a choice between firsthand (indicative tenses) which by definition denotes a witnessed situation and non-firsthand which presents the situation as non-witnessed. The interplay between the grammatical marking and the speaker’s evidential strategy is analyzed by applying a corpus method. The data of the Bulgarian National Corpus are used to detect the preferences for a given strategy considering also the grammatical person which indicates the level of knowledge of the communicants about the situation: the 1st person shows the strong knowledge of the speaker, the 2nd person is related to the strong knowledge of the listener, and the 3rd person is associated with a weak knowledge of both participants. Illustrative examples representative for a given situation are extracted from the corpus and subjected to a context analysis.

## evidentiality system and grammatical homonymy in bulgarian the evidentiality system of bulgarian is classified by @xcite as a1 type (i.e., firsthand vs. non-firsthand), given that the indicative is marked for firsthand, but in fact there are three morphologically marked non-firsthand evidentials: reported, marked by the omission of the auxiliary in the 3 rd person; inferential, marked by the presence of the auxiliary in the 3 rd person; dubitative, marked by the auxiliary бил in all persons. the non-firsthand evidentials arose from the perfect tense and further developed temporal paradigms @xcite . an important feature of the evidentiality in bulgarian is the appearance of the imperfect active participle -an innovation that does not exist in the other slavic languages. it is used in the non-firsthand evidentials and cannot form the perfect indicative. in the process of paradigm formation, several cases of grammatical homonymy emerged: ## statistical data the first step of the present study is to provide statistical information about the evidential strategies in the relevant context. we use the bulgarian national corpus to obtain the number of occurrences of the firsthand and the non-firsthand evidentials after verba dicendi using as a search method a regular expression for the following pattern: as the disambiguation of the perfect indicative and the aorist inferential is impossible, the perfect has been sorted as an indirect evidential. the results are presented in ## analysis of the results the total number of the sentences with the 3 rd person in the main clause is the biggest one, i.e., the indirect speech is most often used to transmit the utterance of a non-participant in the speech act. furthermore, among the sentences with the 3 rd person in the main clause, most are those with the 3 rd person in the dependent clause, too (the referent could be the same or different). in all kinds of combinations of grammatical persons in the main and the dependent clause, sentences with the firsthand in the dependent clause prevails. this fact can be explained with the frequent use of the present indicative in the dependent clause, as in bulgarian there is no tense agreement. as it can be seen in the table, in the majority of configurations, the use of the firsthand is more than 90%. there are three combinations that increase the percentage of the non-firsthand evidentials: 2 nd person -3 rd person (you said that he did something): 84% vs. 16%; 3 rd person -2 nd person (he said that you did something): 65% vs. 35%; 3 rd person -3 rd person (he said that he did something): 66% vs. 34%. the common point of the three cases is the lack of the 1 st person both in the main and the dependent clause. the combination of the 2 nd person in the main and the dependent clause does not cause the raise of the percentage of the non-firsthand. the biggest increase of the non-firsthand may be seen in sentences with the 3 rd person in the main clause -35% and 34%. these cases imply the weakest knowledge of the situation by the speaker. ## two evidential strategies: general trends in sentences with a verb of utterance in the main clause, both firsthand and non-firsthand may occur in the dependent clause, but with the opposite distribution when combined with past and non-past tenses. ## analysis of instances of the evidential strategies in what follows, we make qualitative analysis of sentences extracted from the bulnc and sorted by the person in the main clause. we aim at establishing how the choice of a given strategy is motivated by the grammatical person, at the same time considering the abovementioned relation between evidential strategy and tense (past or nonpast). ## 1 st person in the main clause with the 1 st person in the main clause the speaker reports their own information. ## 2 nd person in the main clause with the 2 nd person in the main clause the speaker quotes the utterance of their interlocutor. ## 3 rd person in the main clause using the 3 rd person in the main clause, the speaker reports somebody else's utterance. ## conclusions bulgarian is a language with grammaticalized evidentiality but displays complicated strategies in communicative acts with converted speech after verbs of utterance involving both firsthand and non-firsthand evidentials. some problems are difficult to resolve due to the grammatical homonymy. however, conclusions about evidential strategies in the described context can be made. the main viewpoint for the choice of evidential strategy is the knowledge of the speaker about the information they communicate. the 1 st person in the main and/or in the dependent clause is connected to the predominance of the firsthand strategy. the non-firsthand evidentials combined with the 1 st person are often associated with a false statement. the same function may have the 2 nd person imperative or future of the verb 'say' in the main clause followed by non-firsthand in the dependent clause, with which the speaker expresses their wish the false statement to be made by the addressee. the weakest knowledge of the speaker is encoded in the 3 rd person and results in the increase of the non-firsthand in the dependent clause. the grammatical marking of the non-firsthand evidentials in the 3 rd person allows for the differentiation of the inferential and the reported, but the homonymy between the aorist inferential and the perfect indicative remains difficult to resolve. the dubitative is marked in all persons and even in cases of homonymy with the perfect/pluperfect reportative, the disambiguation is easy in the context. despite the grammaticalization of the evidentiality, the verb 'say' is a strong evidential marker, and in some contexts, it is sufficient to indicate the non-firsthand.