نوع مقاله : مقاله پژوهشی
عنوان مقاله English
نویسندگان English
Evidentiality refers to the linguistic encoding of information source, the speaker’s type of epistemic access, and the degree of commitment to the truth of a proposition. It is regarded as a central concept in semantics, pragmatics, and cognitive linguistics. Although Persian lacks a grammaticalized and obligatory evidential system (Windfuhr, 2009), linguistic evidence indicates that the language establishes systematic and fine-grained distinctions among types of epistemic sources through a range of non-morphological strategies, including lexical devices, syntactic constructions, and, in particular, perceptual and sensory verbs. Drawing on the theoretical framework of Aikhenvald (2004) and building on previous research on evidentiality in Persian, the present study investigates the role of sensory verbs in representing sources of knowledge and reconstructs the evidential hierarchy in Persian.
The study adopts a descriptive–analytical methodology. The data are drawn from a diverse corpus of contemporary Persian spoken discourse, media texts, and literary works. Qualitative analysis demonstrates that sensory verbs in Persian are organized along a hierarchical continuum ranging from direct sensory perception to indirect, inferential, and reportative evidential meanings. This hierarchy correlates significantly with the degree of propositional certainty, the speaker’s epistemic commitment, and the interactional functions of these verbs in discourse.
The findings indicate that verbs of vision and hearing exhibit the greatest capacity for encoding direct or semi-direct knowledge and for conferring epistemic authority on propositions, whereas more internally oriented sensory verbs primarily serve to express subjective experience, mental evaluation, and inference. The results underscore the necessity of a systematic analysis of sensory verbs for explaining evidential mechanisms in Persian and contribute to comparative research on languages that lack an independent grammatical category of evidentiality.
کلیدواژهها English
