EN
The development of the epistemic 'kako da' in Macedonian, a Balkan Slavic language, illustrates the rise of a modal from a construction according to regular mechanisms of change. The change of a comparison subjunctive subordinator (kako da1), to a sensory evidential (kako da3) occurred in highly specialized contexts due to reanalysis and subjectification. The paper hypothesizes that 'kako da' was patterned after a borrowed syntactic construction and then underwent semantic and syntactic changes that led to the creation of a sensory evidential.