Studies on evidentiality marking in West and South Slavic

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This volume presents six studies examining evidential functions in Serbian, Slovak, and Polish, with contributions in English, Russian, and German. The focus for West Slavic languages includes sentential adverbs and function words, alongside the roots of evidential marking in clause-combining with perception or seem-verbs in Polish and Serbian, discussing varying degrees of conventionalization. One article specifically analyzes evidential extensions of past tense paradigms in Serbian through a questionnaire survey. Most articles adopt a synchronic perspective, primarily utilizing corpus data, while one study explores early "pre-evidential" stages in the development of the Polish comparison marker jakoby 'as if.' The relationship between evidentiality and epistemic meanings is addressed across all studies, with particular emphasis in two papers on Polish. A third Polish-focused paper offers new insights into 'distance' from a discourse perspective, partially linked to the lexical meaning of reportive sentence adverbs or particles.