Bulgarian Verbs - Evidentials

Evidentials

Bulgarian verbs are inflected not only for aspect, tense and modality, but also for evidentiality, that is, the source of the information conveyed by them. There is a four-way distinction between the unmarked (indicative) forms, which imply that the speaker was a witness of the event or knows it as a general fact; the inferential, which signals general non-witness information or one based on inference; the renarrative, which indicates that the information was reported to the speaker by someone else; and the dubitative, which is used for reported information if the speaker doubts its veracity. This can be illustrated with the four possible ways of rendering in Bulgarian the English sentence 'The dog ate the fish' (here denotes the aorist active participle):

Indicative:

Ку̀чето	изя̀де	рѝбата
kučeto	izjade	ribata
dog-	eat.-3sg	fish-

"I know from my own observation that the dog ate the fish."

Inferential:

Ку̀чето	е	изя̀ло	рѝбата
kučeto	e	izjalo	ribata
dog-	be.3sg	eat.-Nsg	fish-

"The dog must have eaten the fish." (The speaker did not witness it, but inferred it, for example, from the fact that the fish was misssing and there were a pile of fish bones by the kennel.)

Renarrative:

Ку̀чето	изя̀ло	рѝбата
kučeto	izjalo	ribata
dog-	eat.-Nsg	fish-

"I've been told that the dog ate the fish."

Dubitative:

Ку̀чето	било̀	изя̀ло	рѝбата
kučeto	bilo	izjalo	ribata
dog-	be.-Nsg	eat.-Nsg	fish-

"I've been told that the dog ate the fish, but I doubt it." (Alternatively, this can be taken to imply that the speaker has heard about it from someone else, who in turn was not a witness of the event).

On a theoretical level, there are alternatives to treating those forms as the four members of a single evidential category. I. Kutsarov, for example, posits a separate category, which he terms 'type of utterance' (вид на изказването), proper to which is only the distinction between forms, expressing speaker's own statements (indicative, inferential), and forms that retell statements of another (renarrative, dubitative). The inferential is then viewed as one of the moods, and the dubitative - as a renarrative inferential, whose dubitative meaning, albeit more frequent, is only secondary. Another view is presented by G. Gerdzhikov - in his treatment there are two distinctive features involved - subjectivity and renarrativity. The indicative is unmarked for both, the inferential is marked for subjectivity, the renarrative - for renarrativity, and the dubitative is marked for both subjectivity and renarrativity.