Evidentiality in Uzbek and Kazakh

 

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CHAPTER 5 
EKAN/EKEN AND THE EXPRESSION OF EMOTIVITY 
The same morphemes, ekan/eken, that express non-firsthand information source via the 
expression of non-confirmativity have a second purpose. This purpose is to express 
EMOTIVITY
in the form of admiratives and rhetorical questions. Morphemes that express evidential meaning 
are known to express 
ADMIRATIVITY
, or the expression of unexpected information, but it is 
comparatively rare for these same morphemes to also play a role in the creation of rhetorical 
questions. Because ekan/eken can express both, I propose to unite these two functions as means 
of expressing emotivity, as ekan/eken may indicate that the utterance they are attached to is an 
instance of the use of language in its emotive function. When ekan/eken are employed to 
indicate this emotive function of language, they are glossed as 
EMOT
(emotive). 
Although 
EMOTIVITY
is generally agreed upon as a major function of language, the 
discussion of this function is not often expanded beyond the realm of obvious emotive 
morphemes like interjections or exclamations. For this reason I open with a discussion of the 
emotive function of language and the relationship between the functions of language, speech 
acts, and sentence types. The second section of this chapter addresses the use of ekan/eken to 
express 
ADMIRATIVITY
, which I propose is, in Uzbek and Kazakh, an expression of emotivity 
within declarative sentences. R
HETORICAL QUESTIONS
are discussed in the next section, and I 
likewise propose that these arise from the expression of emotivity in interrogative sentences.
The final section connects the various meanings expressed by ekan/eken: non-confirmativity, 
non-firsthand information source, and admirativity/emotivity. I propose in this final section that 
the incompatability of non-confirmativity, a subjective type of 
STATUS
or 
MODALITY
, with 

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interrogativity results in the surfacing of the secondary meanings expressed by ekan/eken: 
evidentiality and emotivity.