Towards Evidentiality Markers in Albanian and Macedonian Bilingual Political Discourse

The article concerns the two main problems connected to evidentiality in bilingual Macedonian and Albanian political discourse:Firstly, there is a problem of matching the form in the original to its equivalent in translation, which is not trivial in case of perfect in Macedonian-Albanian and Albanian-Macedonian translation. Macedonian perfect is homonymous to some evidential forms, whereas in Albanian there is an expansion of perfect at the expense of aorist. So perfect in both languages under consideration can be better described as a frame, inside which different phenomena take place, using the suitable definition by F. Fici. The translation between the languages provides some algorithms for defining the intent of the form’s original meaning.Secondly, the problem of interaction between a grammatical and a lexical marker when used together is described. The bilingual discourse gives some insights as to how the common meaning of the phrase can be drawn from the lexical and grammatical components and then recoded in the target language. Keywords: evidentiality; political discourse; bilingual discourse; perfect; translation