ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the concept of evidentiality first as a pragmatic device and then as a stylistic analytical device. Since reported speech is of great significance in the corpus of the present research (Sa‘di’s narrative style) a separate section has been assigned to indirect evidentials in general and reported speech in particular. This has been taken into consideration from functional and cultural-cognitive approaches. Meanwhile, reported speech structure in Persian has been discussed in order to make non-natives familiar with instances in which the syntactic structure of reported speech has been used. The rest of the chapter includes the connection of the concept of social trust to reported speech. Finally, evidentiality is looked at as a distinguishing linguistic device whose frequent use can be viewed as a literary stylistic feature in literary masterpieces.
