MORPHOSYNTACTIC STRATEGIES FOR EXPRESSING EVIDENTIALITY IN UZBEK AND ENGLISH: A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS
Keywords:
Keywords: evidentiality, Uzbek language, English language, contrastive analysis, morphosyntax, grammaticalization, information source, Turkic linguistics, modalityAbstract
Abstract. This study presents a contrastive analysis of the morphosyntactic
strategies employed for expressing evidentiality in Uzbek and English. Evidentiality–
the linguistic encoding of information source and the speaker’s basis for a claim–is
realized through fundamentally different mechanisms in these typologically distant
languages. Uzbek, as an agglutinative Turkic language, possesses a grammaticalized
evidential system marked by dedicated verbal suffixes that obligatorily distinguish
direct evidence from hearsay and inference. English, as an analytic Indo-European
language, lacks grammaticalized evidentiality but expresses equivalent semantic
distinctions through a range of lexical and syntactic strategies including modal verbs,
adverbials, complement clause constructions, and reported speech patterns. Drawing
on a parallel corpus of 500 sentence pairs extracted from literary, journalistic, and
academic texts, this study identifies and classifies the evidential strategies of both
languages, maps their functional correspondences, and analyzes the translation
challenges that arise from the structural asymmetry between a grammatical and a
lexical evidential system. Results demonstrate that Uzbek employs four primary
morphological evidential markers, while English distributes equivalent functions
across at least twelve distinct lexicosyntactic constructions, creating systematic non-
equivalence in translation. The findings contribute to contrastive Turkic–Germanic
linguistics and carry practical implications for translation studies, second language
pedagogy, and the typological understanding of evidentiality across language families.
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