The Italian epistemic future and Russian epistemic markers as linguistic manifestations of conjectural conclusion: a comparative analysis

The article provides an analysis of some Russian discourse markers (such as navernoe, naverno, verojatno, vidimo, vidno, pochože, kažetsja, kak budto) as possible translations of Italian epistemic future (Bertinetto 1979, Rocci 2000, Squartini 2004), insofar as they may indicate conjectural conclusion in communicative situations of knowledge through a sign (the notion of "conjectural conclusion" as "connective predicate" has been defined within the framework of Congruity Theory Rigotti 2005, Rocci 2005, Gatti 2010). As a result of translational substitutions and of a comparative analysis of communicative contexts, it was possible to determine some differences between Italian epistemic future and Russian markers of conjectural conclusion, insofar as they may convey different ways of drawing a conclusion. More precisely they may mark: 1. different inferential reasonings (inductive or abductive, both with a hypothetical conclusion, or deductive reasoning with a necessary conclusion); 2. different kinds of evidence of the reasoning is based on: 1. in praesentia (for induction): the premise is based on perceptive data 2: in absentia (for deduction, Kronnning 2001): the premise is based i) on usual concomitance known to both speakers or ii) on speculative universal laws (Rocci 2005) 3. both in praesentia and in absentia for abduction. 3. different degrees of the hypothetical state of things the speaker is stating in his conclusion (i.e. the force of his thesis, cf. Snoeck Henkemans 1997). 4. different degrees of epistemic certainty. The analysis of Russian epistemic markers is based on a corpus of oral dialogues from the National Corpus of Russian Language (www.ruscorpora.ru).