Distribution of Evidential Meanings in Elicited Narratives in Native and Non-Native Russian
The study provides a quantitative and qualitative comparison of evidential strategies in written Russian narratives produced by native and non-native speakers. Despite a substantial body of research on evidentiality from a typological perspective and its first language acquisition by children, the question of how adult learners implement evidential meanings in written L2 production remains open. The aim is to identify differences in the distribution of evidential meanings and their linguistic encoding across the two groups. The research is conducted within a functional-semantic framework and employs quantitative statistical methods. The material consists of 60 texts produced by Chinese learners of Russian (A2 proficiency) and 39 texts by native Russian speakers, collected using the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN). The distribution of three main evidential meanings (direct evidentiality, inference, hearsay) was analyzed, as well as their verbal realization at the level of specific lexico-grammatical markers. While the overall proportion of evidential clauses is comparable across groups (approximately 89%), the distribution of evidential types differs significantly. Chinese learner narratives are dominated by direct evidentiality, reflecting a predominantly descriptive strategy focused on the immediate description of observable events. Native speaker narratives, in contrast, are characterized by a predominance of inference, expressed through the frequent use of mental state verbs, perception verbs attributed to characters, and evaluative markers. Hearsay is virtually absent in the non-native group, whereas native speakers employ it to convey narrative dialogicity. Adult L2 learners successfully transfer basic cognitive mechanisms of source monitoring to the target language, but at the A2 level their evidential competence manifests in a simplified strategy characterized by a focus on description. The findings have direct pedagogical implications for teaching Russian as a foreign language: developing interpretative skills and expanding the repertoire of evidential devices should be a priority at advanced stages of learning.
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Krasnoshchekova, S. V., Galkina, E. V., Wang, Y. (2026). Distribution of Evidential Meanings in Elicited Narratives in Native and Non-Native Russian, Research Result. Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, 12 (2), 139–163.
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The study was supported by the Russian Science Foundation, project no. 25-18-00938“Evidential Strategies in Light of Corpus and Experimental Data (Based on Structurally Diverse Languages)”.