Evidentiality Strategies in contemporary Persian

Evidentiality is the linguistic encoding of the source of information. The present study, focusing Aikhenvald's framework seeks to investigate the strategies of evidentiality- grammatical constructions and lexical means which their primary meaning is not evidentiality- in contemporary Persian. For the purposes of this study the required data were collected from TV serials, novels, and daily newspapers. The results depict that evidentiality strategies used by Persian speakers to convey information source are present perfect structures, modal verbs, verbs of speech in impersonal constructions, verbs of perception and cognition, compound verbs in subordinating constructions, verbs related to the five senses, evidential adverbs and reported speech. Contrary to others' belief, passive structures cannot acquire evidential overtones in the Persian language. Among these strategies, only the verbs related to the five senses express firsthand evidentiality and the other strategies express non-‌firsthand evidentiality.