Linguistica Philologica – serie

While all languages can express epistemic awareness regarding the source of a message's content, Romance languages lack mandatory indicators. Such markers enhance confidence in sources such as journalism by specifying whether information is based on experience, hearsay or inference. Although they are not apparent, we can elucidate this by explicitly stating the origin of our knowledge, typically to lessen responsibility. Over the past 30 years, studies have explored markers of knowledge origin, yet consensus on evidentiality markers and effective research methods remains elusive. This book takes a comparative approach, focusing on content as well as linguistic forms such as adverbs, adjectives, verbs and tenses. Evidentiality provides non-predicative information and distinguishes between sources of information such as personal observation, external communication or inference. Communication generally lacks differentiation of sources, resulting in broad evidential-epistemic marking.

The present volume contains a selection of papers presented at the Fifth International Symposium Russian Grammar: System–Usus–Language Variation, from September 22 to 24, 2021, at the University of Potsdam (Germany). The selected essays tackle the issues that arise when Russian Grammar meets new linguistic paradigms (such as corpus linguistics) and new challenges (such as heritage languages). The relevant findings are discussed with a particular focus on an updated version of the 1980 Academy grammar of Russian.