Studi di linguistica slava. Nuove prospettive e metodologie di ricerca

The present paper examines the Russian discourse markers мол and дескать as Renarrative markers that generally are considered conventional means to indicate information sources. Etymologically, they derive from verba dicendi. In this paper, relying on a large amount of occurrences taken from Russian Italian bilingual corpus composed by the author, a qualitative analysis of their semantics is carries out. They can express different meanings: referring to someone else's text with accurate or inaccurate quoting, pointing to their information source, expressing doubts about the reliability of transmitted information, interpreting gestures through verbal means and sometimes have contact-establishing and intensifying functions. The survey allows to affirm that these markers indicate evidentiality, because they create a distance between the information and the person which communicates this information and make an important contribution to evaluate the truthfulness of a proposition