MORPHOLOGICAL MARKERS OF EVIDENTIALITY IN BULGARIAN AND SLOVENIAN

The article offers a comparative analysis of evidentiality in Bulgarian and Slovenian, focusing on its interaction with epistemic modality. Bulgarian is shown to possess a grammaticalized evidential system integrated into the verbal paradigm, encoding distinctions between direct and indirect information and degrees of speaker commitment. Slovenian, by contrast, lacks a dedicated evidential category and expresses evidential meanings through modal particles and constructions such as naj + conditional, whose interpretation is largely context-dependent. The comparison highlights different grammatical strategies for encoding information source and epistemic stance in closely related languages.