Pragmatics of fiction: Discourse markers of evidentiality

The study aims to justify the evidential conditioning of the pragmatic parameters of fiction. Based on the text of V. V. Orlov’s novel “Shevrikuka, or Love for a Ghost”, it has been revealed that the category of evidentiality possesses a wide range of means that allow for the realization of the communicative-pragmatic potential of literary discourse. Such are the particles “мол” and “де”, parenthetical and introductory constructions, as well as linguistic and textual units with the semantics of perceptivity. The scientific originality of the study is determined by the fact that for the first time, evidentiality, a semantically-syntactic category of a modal type, is considered as one of the determining factors in the formation and functioning of fiction. As a result, it has been found that the pragmatics of the evidential statement in literary discourse is determined by three participants in aesthetic communication, i.e., the communicator, the narrator, and the reader. At the textual and super-textual levels, evidentiality is objectified by the semantics of perceptivity, which creates the illusion that events are real. At the same time, the semantics of perceptivity is an important characteristic of the statement itself, rather than the relationship of the statement to reality; the narrator provides information about the event, real in the coordinates of fiction.