Indagine attorno alla categoria dell’evidenzialità nell’ambito della lingua ungherese e delle sue varietà diacroniche e diatopiche

This paper aims to investigate the category of evidentiality in Hungarian. Evidentiality refers to the ways languages encode information source. In contemporary standard Hungarian evidentiality is not grammaticalised, it can only be expressed at the lexical level. The question we intend to discuss is the following: can we postulate evidential strategies in an earlier stage of development of Hungarian and/or in non-standard varieties of the language? As we will show, this is indeed the case. We argue that there must have been evidential functions of the past tenses in Hungarian, functions that developed and disappeared in parallel with the appearance in the late Proto-Hungarian period and then with the loss after a thousand years of the analytic past tenses in Hungarian grammar, a linguistic evolution due to contact-induced change. Traces of the ancient evidential system are still found today in the most archaic and conservative eastern dialects of Hungarian (székely, csángó).