A contrastive study of evidentiality in Turkish and French

In this work, which aims to study the semantic and typological aspect of evidentiality, we have asked the question of whether it exists as a grammatical category in French. As part of this reflection, we wondered whether this category has a grammaticalized form and whether its marking is obligatory or optional. In addition, we wanted to realize the different linguistic means used by this language to express the indirect evidentiality. To do this, by adopting a contrastive approach, we carried out a morphological, syntactical and lexical analysis of the evidential sentences found in the bilingual corpus, collected from two Turkish novels and their translations into French. The data obtained from this analysis allows us to affirm that this category, grammaticalized and obligatorily marked in Turkish by the morpheme - (y) mIş, is not necessarily marked in French; its marking being optional, it has no grammaticalized form. Consequently, the different expressions of evidentiality are rendered by multiple linguistic forms morphologically, syntactically and lexically. Key Words: Evidentiality, Indirectivity, Mirativity, Contrastive Linguistics, Turkish, French.