Some remarks on reported evidentiality in French and in Estonian: A contrastive approach

Abstract

Among the multiple meanings of the French conditional, the marking of mediated information is generally pointed out in the studies treating this mood in French. In Estonian there is a specialized grammatical(ized) form for marking reported evidentiality – the quotative mood.

Our paper aims to study the contrast between the use of evidentiality strategies in French and Estonian. The analysis will be based on a translated parallel corpus and on different types of texts and studies of monolingual corpora of both languages.

In typological studies the French conditional and the Estonian grammatical evidentials are considered as belonging to the same type of evidentiality, that of reported information (Aikhenvald 2006). However, it appears that they tend to be used in different types of discourse. This observation has served as a starting point for our study: the aim of our contrastive analysis is to find out whether these divergences are confirmed by translated texts, whether they also reveal semantic differences between these evidentiality markers, and which strategies are used in the translations in both directions.