Man In India, 96 (3) : 771-777 © Serials Publications 1 Assistant Professor of the Institute of International Relations, History and Oriental Studies, Kazan (Volga Region) Federal University, Kazan, Russia, E-mail: alsu.03@mail.ru 2 Professor of the Department of Foreign Languages, Kazan State Power Engineering University, Kazan, Russia, E-mail: gflutfullina@mail.ru ANTHROPOLOGICAL FACTOR OF INFORMATION ACCESS AND CATEGORY OF EVIDENTIALITY: COMPARATIVE ANALYSES OF ENGLISH AND TATAR LANGUAGES Alsu N. Makhmutova 1 and Gulnara F. Lutfullina 2 The importance of this research problem is attributable to deficiency of studies on interrelationship between linguistic categories and lingual-cultural factors. The article focuses on identifying evidential systems and strategies as an anthropological marker of nations’ attitude to various information sources. Methods of structural-functional and comparative analysis revealed evidential strategies in the English language and evidential system in the Tatar language. The research shows that at anthropological level, syntactic representation of perception category in English reflects importance of personal perception of information; in Tatar grammatical representation of “non-firsthand” meaning or “reported evidential” emphasizes the absence of direct perception. Thus, personal perception is of great importance for English speakers whereas Tatar speakers tend to highlight absence of immediate access to information. Keywords: anthropological factor ; information ; evidentiality ; evidential language system. INTRODUCTION Culture is the subject of cultural anthropology. Cultural anthropology studies phenomena of material and intellectual culture in all its aspects: worldview, mentality, national character, results of spiritual, social and industrial activities. Cultural anthropology investigates the unique human ability to develop culture through dialogue and communication, considering a great variety of human cultures, their interactions and conflicts. As a branch of general linguistics, cultural linguistics has recently received much attention in the research of language categories. Evidentiality is a linguistic category with a primary meaning of source of information. (Aikhenvald, 2004). Establishing categorical status of evidentiality is problematic, being a complex category it is manifested at grammatical (Plungian, 2001; Lazard, 2001), functional (Mustajoki, 2006), communicative-pragmatic (Gurajek, 2010; De Haan, 2001) and anthropological levels. Mode of knowing / obtaining information is the method of accessing information, depending on the degree of the speaker’s participation, and specified in the opposition: direct/indirect, personal/impersonal. Evidential meaning is the most common one manifested in the language.