Reportive evidentials in English and Lithuanian

Abstract

The paper is concerned with lexical realizations of reportive evidentiality (Boye and Harder 2009; Celle 2009; Wiemer 2007; Aikhenvald 2008; Wiemer 2010b; Boye 2012) across different discourse types and languages. Our aim is to see how language specific the realizations and conceptualization of indirect reportive evidentiality are by contrasting the findings of the analysis of the data collected from various monolingual and parallel corpora. One of the purposes of this contrastive analysis is to find out what kind of correspondence one can expect when dealing with the reportive sub-domain of the linguistic category of evidentiality. The analysis is focused on the hearsay adverbs in English (reportedly, allegedly, supposedly) and Lithuanian adverbials neva ‘allegedly’, tariamai ‘supposedly’, esą ‘allegedly’ as well as their bi-directionally established translation correspondences (comment clauses, complement-taking predicates, as-parentheticals, etc.). The present study is corpus-based and makes use of quantitative and qualitative methods of research. The Lithuanian data have been drawn from the Corpus of Academic Lithuanian (CorALit) and from the spoken, news and fiction sub-corpora of the Corpus of the Contemporary Lithuanian Language (CCLL). The English data have been extracted from the British National Corpus (BYU-BNC). To establish translation correspondences between the items under study, a parallel bidirectional fiction corpus ParaCorpEN-LT-EN, and a collection of translations from English into Lithuanian of EU documents (Glosbe) have been used. Our findings indicate that both sets of adverbials are mainly used in written language (news and academic discourse in English and news discourse and fiction in Lithuanian); however, there is very weak equivalence in their translation correspondences. The question is raised whether the Lithuanian adverbials can be regarded as reportive evidentials.