New tendencies in the study of modality: epistemic modality and evidentiality

Aim. The following article goes back to a series of research work on modality and evidentiality and focuses on the interrelation and division of labor between the syntax-semantic interface and the expressions with grammatical categories of mood and mode on one side, and lexical or morphological items on the other.Methodology. The present article is based on functional approach of functional syntax and semantics combined with the theory of generative grammar and minimalism. The second part has a comparative component showing the wide range of affixal expressions with which the agglutinative languages such as Kazakh and Kirgiz mark epistemic modality. The comparative approach is seemingly to be preferred over a monolingual functional one because the comparison can show differences and similarities and thus shed light into new ways of conveying grammatical functions and lexical meanings in different types of languages.Results. It can be shown that while modality is a category which seems to have universal implications, that means there are no languages which lack modality, evidentiality can be expressed either explicitly (by lexical or grammatical expressions) or implicitly (via pragmatic inference, deixis or presuppositins).Research implications. As opposed to the Indo-European languages where the distincition of epistemic modality and evidentiality is based on the so called portmanteu effect, meaning that epistemic modality can include evidentiality, the expression of evidentiality in Kazakh and Kirgiz is expressed by inference or deicticly. This material makes a certain contribution to the further development of the theory of modality as a universal language category from the perspective of both Russian and Turkological comparative linguistics.

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