ELSEVIER Journal of Pragmatics 33 (2001) 401--420 joln~ihll www.elsevier.nl/locate/pragma Epistemic marking and reliability judgments" Evidence from Bulgarian Stanka A. Fitneva* Department of Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA Abstract Most linguists contend that epistemic markers for source-of-information also encode the speaker's assessment of the reliability of that information. Their claim tacitly questions the utility of source-of-information marking and its validity, which depends on the ability to dis- tinguish source-of-information from speaker-attitude marking. I argue that the source of information has a distinct function in the conversational exchange and that it is possible to distinguish source-of-information from speaker-attitude marking. The former does not have consistent implications about the evaluation of the reliability of the information while the lat- ter represents such an evaluation. I use this criterion to assess competing claims about the meaning of grammatical epistemic markers in Bulgarian. The results from two studies suggest that epistemic marking in Bulgarian characterizes the source of information rather than the speaker's attitude. © 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Attitudes; Bulgarian; Evaluation; Evidentiality; Source of information 1. Introduction Speakers of different languages can qualify the reliability of information they express in two ways. First, they can signal its source, e.g., (1) direct perception, (2) I would like to thank the children from day-care center 'Slancho' and from Marin Drinov School in Varna for their participation in the experiments, and the administrators of these two establishments for their cooperation. The research reported in this paper was supported by a travel grant from the Mario Einaudi Center for International Study and the Cognitive Studies Program at Cornell University and was conducted using equipment of the Cornell Language Acquisition Laboratory. I am very grateful to Wayles Browne, Sally McConneU-Ginet,and Michael Macy for the many hours of discussion in which they generously shared their insights into the topic of this paper. The usual dis- claimer about responsibility for the ideas presented in the paper applies. * E-mail: safl3@cornell.edu 0378-2166/01/$ - see front matter © 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PlI: S0378-2166(00)00010-2