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Językoznawstwo baner

No. 2/27 (2026)

Articles

Evidentiality in Turkish–Russian comparative perspective (based on translation)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.25312/j.10676  [Google Scholar]
Published: 2026-06-24

Abstract

This article examines evidentiality in Turkish and the strategies used to render it in Russian translation, based on parallel fragments from Orhan Pamuk’s novel Masumiyet Müzesi and its Russian translation. The study applies a comparative analysis of parallel literary texts to investigate the cross-linguistic interpretation of grammatical meaning. Turkish has grammaticalized markers of evidentiality, especially the past tense form in -mIş, which signals indirect evidence, inference, or the speaker’s distance from the reported event. Russian, however, lacks evidentiality as an independent grammatical category, which leads to its neutralization or partial compensation in translation. The analysis shows that Russian has no direct morphological equivalent for Turkish evidential forms; evidential distinctions are conveyed only partly through contextual aspectual choices, shifts in narrative perspective, and lexical means. The study concludes that, in translation, evidentiality becomes subordinate to broader aspectual and modal interpretation strategies.

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