ABSTRACT The purpose of this work is to describe and account for the broad range of phenomena
referred to as “evidentiality” in two Turkic languages: Uzbek and Kazakh. Much
previous work on the Turkic languages treats evidentiality as a distinct verbal category.
However, morphemes that express evidential meaning also often express other meanings
such as dubitativity and admirativity, or may even express rhetorical questions. This
work follows Friedman (1978; 1981; 1988) and others in considering these meanings to
be the result of an evidential-like strategy: the expression of non-confirmativity.
In Uzbek and Kazakh, as well as in many other Eurasian languages, the past tense
is the locus of evidential meaning. There are three items in the Uzbek and Kazakh past
tense paradigm, and these differ in terms of markedness for confirmativity: one is marked
as confirmative, one as non-confirmative, and one is unmarked for confirmativity. The
unmarked item, often referred to as the perfect, exists in a copular form. As a copular
form, it expresses marked non-confirmativity. When this copular form (in Uzbek: ekan,
in Kazakh: eken) is employed to express non-confirmativity, this non-confirmativity is
manifested either as non-firsthand information source or as admirativity.
By employing the non-confirmative analysis, we are able to account for the broad
range of phenomena considered “evidential” without resorting to postulating an
evidential category. Rather, in Uzbek and Kazakh, evidential meaning is merely one
effect of the expression of non-confirmativity, which is a subtype of the categories of
status or modality.
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NOTES ON ORTHOGRAPHY AND PHONOLOGY For the purpose of readability, data from Uzbek and Kazakh is presented in the Latin
alphabet.
