Evidentiality and Epistemic Stance in Uzbek Academic Discourse: A Corpus-Based Pragmatic Analysis

Abstract

This study investigates the linguistic encoding of evidentiality and epistemic stance in written Uzbek academic discourse, drawing on a purpose-built corpus of 120 peer-reviewed journal articles published between 2015 and 2024. Uzbek, as an agglutinative Turkic language with morphologically rich evidential marking, represents an underexplored site for discourse-level pragmatic analysis. Through systematic corpus annotation and qualitative close reading, this research identifies four dominant evidential strategies—direct evidentials, inferential markers, reportative constructions, and hedging devices—and examines how these strategies are distributed across disciplinary sub-genres (natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities). Findings reveal that Uzbek academic writers employ significantly more reportative and hedging constructions in humanities writing compared with natural sciences, reflecting divergent epistemological cultures embedded in discourse conventions. The study also identifies an emergent hybrid evidential pattern influenced by Russian and English academic norms, which disrupts traditional Turkic evidential morphology. These results have direct implications for academic literacy pedagogy, cross-linguistic pragmatics, and the theoretical modeling of evidentiality in under-resourced languages. The study contributes original empirical evidence to the growing scholarship on Central Asian linguistic identities and academic discourse communities.