Considerations regarding the evidentials in Romanian oral popular texts (aspects on the sources of knowledge and their linguistic features)

Every language has a specific way of saying what it is talking about, how it knows and what it thinks about what it knows. In some languages, it is always necessary to specify the source of information on which the speaker is relying – whether he saw the event, or heard it, or inferred it from something seen or common sense, or was told about it by someone else. This is the essence of evidence or grammatical marking of the source of information – an interesting category appreciated by linguists. The present paper tries to offer a modern vision regarding the different forms of manifes­tation of evidence and their role in knowledge and discourse, illustrated by Romanian oral popular texts. The study is based on examples taken from fairy tales, species that use folk narrative as a type of stylistic narration. The work has three parts: in the first part, the general theoretical aspects regarding evidence are discussed; the second part refers to the specialized Romanian bibliography related to the phenomenon under dis­cussion; in the third part, the ways of expressing the evidentiality used in the selected texts are analysed; the last part presents the conclusions of our approach and some proposals for how to continue the analysis on other categories of texts than those addressed in the present study.