Médiativité ou ‘evidentiality’? Alternance de référentiels temporels dans la narration en bulgare
Mediativity or 'evidentiality'? Alternating temporal reference in the narration in Bulgarian

Summary/Abstract: This article deals with the much debated questions on the semantics of Modern Bulgarian verbal forms of the type чел/четял reffered to as “reported”, “renarrated”, “mediative” or “evidential”, and чел е /четял e reffered to as “conclusive” , or “inferential”. Without going into the controversy concerning the place of these perfect-like forms in the grammatical system of the contemporary Bulgarian language, our intention is to show that the presence or the omission of the third person auxiliary is a phenomenon associated with the establishment of a point-of-view relation between the speaker (enunciator) and the message he presents. The first part of the paper deals with some theoretical and epistemological issues („опосред- ственост” and „evidentiality”) and introduces the basic operational concepts. Using the framework of the Theory of enunciation (Тheorie de l’enonciation), whose key parameters are the еnunciator (Ego) and his spatio-temporal coordinates hic and nunc, we show that the notion “temporal frame of reference” also plays a crucial role for the localization of the verbalized situations according to the enunciator’s stance towards them. In the second part of the paper, special attention is paid to the alternation between different „temporal frames 84 of reference”. We show that this alternation is a narrative strategy which opposes situations presented by the enunciator as non-actualized, e.g., in mythical, historical or fictional times (the forms чел/четял) and situatioms presented by the speaker as resulting from abductive reasoning (the forms чел е / четял е).

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