EVIDENTIALITY IN ENGLISH AND SERBIAN QUALITY DAILY PRESS

This paper focuses on the linguistic concept of evidentiality, which is yet to be uniformly defined by linguists, its relationship to epistemic modality, and its linguistic realisation in English and Serbian, specifically in selected corpora from daily quality newspapers in English and Serbian. The aim of the paper is to establish relevant cross-linguistic similarities and/or differences between English and Serbian expressions of evidentiality as manifested in English and Serbian “serious” journalistic discourse by applying contrastive analysis to the various markers of evidentiality used in the selected journalistic corpora of both languages. Methodologically, evidentiality is treated as both a grammatical and a functional category. The corpus is limited to the topic of world news articles, as more uniform samples provide for a more objective contrastive analysis. The analysis of the samples reveals a significant overlap between syntactic structures and semantic properties of reported evidentiality markers in English and Serbian journalistic discourse