
Evidentiality And Temporal Distance in Uzbek And English: A Comparative Analysis
Abstract
This study examines how evidentiality and temporal distance work together in Uzbek and English. It looks at how witnessed and non-witnessed events change the way time is expressed in two very different types of languages. This comparison study shows that there are consistent patterns in evidential-temporal encoding by looking at corpus data from Straughn's (2011) in-depth study of Uzbek evidential markers (-mish, ekan) and new research on English evidential strategies (Riddle, 2024). Uzbek shows grammaticalized evidential-temporal integration through morphological markers that naturally encode temporal-epistemic relationships. English, on the other hand, uses compositional lexical and syntactic strategies. The results support theoretical frameworks that say evidentiality is more than just marking the source of information; it's also a complex system that includes epistemic stance, temporal distance, and discourse organisation (Koev, 2017; Plungian, 2010). These results help us understand universal rules for how evidence and time interact, while also showing how different types of languages use them.
Keywords
Evidentiality, temporal distance, comparative linguistics
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