Evidential Strategies in Russian-language Media Texts of the Kyrgyz Republic

The article addresses the problem of evidential strategies in Russian-language media texts produced under conditions of Russian-Kyrgyz bilingualism and their correlation with analogous strategies in Russian news texts created in a monolingual environment. The relevance of the study is determined by the growing interest of modern linguistics in the study of evidential strategies under conditions of language contacts and bilingualism. The aim of the study is to identify, through comparative analysis, the similarities and differences in the use of the main evidential strategies in Russian-language texts of Kyrgyzstani media and in Russian-language texts produced in the monolingual environment of Russia. The research question is whether the effects of Kyrgyz language interference manifest in Russian-language news discourse in Kyrgyzstan and what specific differences in the use of evidential strategies can be observed between Kyrgyzstani and Russian media texts. The material of the study consists of two datasets: 1,050 texts from three Kyrgyzstani Telegram news channels and 1,050 texts from three Russian Telegram news channels. The methodology included the selection and annotation of contexts, the classification of evidential markers, and a combination of quantitative, qualitative, and comparative analyses. The findings demonstrate that all three major types of evidentiality are present in both datasets, and their frequency distribution generally coincides, which indicates that the absence of interference influence from evidentiality in the Kyrgyz language on Russian-language texts produced in a bilingual environment. At the same time, Kyrgyzstani news texts are characterized by a higher frequency of reportative evidentiality with impersonal sources, implicit authorial marking in statements with direct evidentiality, and a wide use of epistemic markers expressing the speaker’s attitude towards the reported information. Additional features include lowering of register, deviations from Russian language standards, and elements of code-mixing. Future research perspectives involve expanding the range of media speech genres and conducting a more detailed study of the pragmatic functions of evidential strategies in contexts of language contact.