SYNTACTIC PROPERTIES OF EPISTEMIC MODALITY IN TURKISH AND UZBEK

Epistemic modality is the interpretation of a speaker of the factuality of an utterance related to belief, knowledge, and truth about a proposition. These utterances have such meanings as possibility, necessity, belief, reporting, hearsay, inference, opinion, obligation, prediction, quotation, doubt, evidence, and certainty. Epistemic meaning can be marked through lexical markers, modal sentences, idiomatic expressions, etc. in a sentence. In the analyzing of this category, semantic and pragmatic approaches are important to analyze in these markers. Previous studies explored sub categories or different ways of marking of the epistemic modality category, however its syntactic properties have not been studied sufficiently. The syntactical properties of these markers present different findings in terms of both semantics and grammaticalization. In this study, syntactical properties of epistemic modality markers in Uzbek and Turkish will be identified and their role in the Turkish information structure will be discussed. The research is primarily based on the data drawn from the corpora of Uzbek and Turkish written languages. In the design of the corpus, the sampling factors included: excerpts in dialogue form, being close to spoken language, reflecting the characteristic features of the language, origination dates are intermittent, and being written with different stylistic features. In addition, examples from Turkish National Corpus and BBC Uzbek are also included.The purpose of the study is to determine the syntactic properties of epistemic modality markers in two Turkish languages, to explain the limiting factors according to marker types, and the role of these markers in the coding of information.