Evidentiality in Tajik

Sammanfattning: The focus of this study is evidentiality—the grammatical marking of information source—in written and spoken Tajik. For marking evidential statements, Tajik employs a secondary register of verb forms (called register II forms) that all end in -a: the Perfect and the Perfectoids (the Perfectoid Imperfect and Perfectoid Pluperfect). Whereas the Perfect is ambiguous as regards its evidential status, the Perfectoids are unambiguously non-first hand in nature. The register II forms can signal that propositions are reportative or inferential. Moreover, they are used for mirative purposes, i.e. to signal new information or surprise. In addition to the register II forms, Tajik also employs a special verb form called the Presumptive, which is also included in this study.The analysis of written Tajik is based on a close reading of 424 pages of prose fiction texts that can be divided into three groups in accordance with the time periods when they were written: the 1920s–1940s, 1980s and 2010s. The analysis of spoken Tajik is based on ca 9.5 hours of recorded material gathered in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, in the years 2016 and 2017. While the 2016 recordings were in the form of free conversations, the 2017 recordings involved a collaborative exercise developed as a method for investigating grammatical categories related to social cognition. The results of the analyses show that the evidential uses of the register II forms and the Presumptive are more prevalent in the older texts than in the newer texts. As for the spoken language, the register II forms are rarely used for reportative statements. Instead, evidential lexical markers are used with register I forms. However, speakers tend to use register II forms in cases where there is greater temporal distance to the subject matter. Inferences are also usually made with register I forms together with evidential lexical markers. However, the Perfect is employed in the creation of coherent hypothetical narratives. In conclusion, it is argued that the Tajik “mirative” is in fact evidential, since it marks direct experience of two types: new information (mirative) and personal impression (evaluative). It is also argued that the Presumptive is evidential, since it marks conclusions based on either past experiences or previous knowledge.