Subject reference expressing evidentiality in English and Belarusian media texts

The article touches upon the problem of the interrelation between the types of information sources and a) the reliability of the reported data, b) the categories being implemented, and c) the pragmatic effects created in modern English and Belarusian media texts. The purpose of this article is to establish correlations between the referential mechanisms of subject nominations in evidential markers and the degree of reliability of what is being reported, on the one hand, and the realized categories, pragmatic functions in English and Belarusian newspaper texts of different genres, on the other hand. The material of this article comprises written newspaper texts of informational, analytical and opinion genres. The used methods are the inductive method, including observation, analysis, comparison and classification of linguistic facts, as well as the methods of contextual analysis, semantic and pragmatic analysis. It was established that the referential characteristics of subjects directly affect the reliability of what is being reported as the basic feature of evidentiality. It is shown that in both media cultures markers of reported evidence with a referential subject implement authorization with or without explication of the evidential meaning, depending on the presence or absence of the reported fact in the proposition; or deauthorization in the case of encoding a non-referential expressed or implied subject as the source. It was revealed that the texts of different genres of the compared media cultures demonstrate the following categorial-pragmatic correlations. All varieties of evidential markers with a referential subject used together with evaluation intersect with authorization and activate pragmatic effects of guiding reader’s perception. At the same time, evidential markers of different types with a non-referential subject intersect with deauthorization and allow the following pragmatic effects: scaling the opinion or observation of the narrator, reducing journalistic responsibility for what is being reported, stating the very fact of the message, or conveying unreliable information.