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On the basis of present and past developments concerning polar question markers in Estonian and other languages in the Circum-Baltic area, the main sources of interrogative markers are presented: (1) coordination markers: disjunctive, conjunctive and adversative coordination; (2) subordination markers, the source of which is the subordinating conjunction in the case of insubordination of the subordinate clause; (3) epistemic markers, which arise from particles expressing epistemic modality; (4) pronominal markers, which arise from interrogative pronouns and proadverbs in tag questions. Question particles have developed from these same sources in many other languages as well. Typical of the Circum-Baltic languages are disjunctive and conjunctive particles located on the sentence periphery.

The study focuses on dedicated grammatical evidentials and evidentiality strategies in the two main dialects of Livonian -Courland and Salaca Livonian. The analysis of Livonian evidentiality is based on a model originally proposed by Rätsep (1971) for Estonian, which posits two subsystems of reported evidentiality -the reported indicative (oblique mood) and the reported imperative (jussive).The study shows that evidentiality in Livonian -despite the intense and longlasting contacts of this language with Latvian (resulting in heavy structural borrowing in many domains of grammar) and its close genetic relatedness to Estonian -manifests a rather unique configuration of structural features. The most striking of them is that the present tense forms of the Livonian reported indicative are expressed by means of agent nouns agreeing in number with the subject NP. It is argued that this type of evidentiality coding is typologically very rare.

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