Cross-linguistic diachronic studies have focused on the parallel or divergent development of cognate or functionally equivalent items. This paper traces the diachronic convergent development of two unrelated items by means of a case study, the development of the German verb scheinen ‘shine, emit light’ and English seem ‘(originally) befit, beseem’. Despite their different source meanings, the two verbs have grammaticalized into evidential markers, as is evidenced by the constructions scheinen + zu + infinitive and seem + to + infinitive. We use historical corpus data to show that the two verbs have converged both semantically and syntactically. Semantically the verbs converge when they acquire the sense ‘appear, become visible’, a well-known source of evidentials. Syntactically, scheinen and seem come to occur in the same range of constructional patterns. This development is more advanced in English, so that it is ahead of German by at least four centuries.
Article outline
1.Introduction
2.Background
2.1German scheinen and English seem: Sources and targets
2.1.1German scheinen
2.1.2English seem
2.2Evidentiality and the grammaticalization of evidential markers
1986Evidentials, paths of change, and mental maps: Typologically regular asymmetries. In Wallace Chafe & Johanna Nichols (eds.), Evidentiality: The linguistic coding of epistemology, 273–312. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Barber, Charles
1993The English language: A historical introduction. Cambridge: CUP.
COSMAS I/II = Corpus Search, Management and Analysis System
1991–2012Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim. Available online at [URL]
De Haan, Ferdinand
1999Evidentiality and epistemic modality: Setting boundaries. Southwest Journal of Linguistics 181. 83–101.
De Haan, Ferdinand
2007Raising as grammaticalization: The case of Germanic seem-verbs. Rivista di Linguistica 19(1). 129–150.
DeReKo = Das Deutsche Referenzkorpus DeReKo
Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim. Available online at [URL]
Diewald, Gabriele
2001Scheinen-Probleme: Analogie, Konstruktionsmischung und die Sogwirkung aktiver Grammatikalisierungskanäle. In Reimar Müller & Marga Reis (eds.), Modalität und Modalverben im Deutschen, 87–110. Hamburg: Buske.
Diewald, Gabriele
2004Faktizität und Evidentialität: Semantische Differenzierungen bei den Modal- und Modalitätsverben im Deutschen. In Oddleif Leirbukt (ed.), Tempus/Temporalität und Modus/Modalität im Deutschen – auch in konstrastiver Perspektive. Internationales Kolloquium, 8–9 September 2000, Bergen, 231–258. Tübingen: Stauffenburg.
2007A history of English evidential verbs of appearance. English Language and Linguistics 111. 1–29.
Heine, Bernd & Tania Kuteva
2002World lexicon of grammaticalization. Cambridge: CUP.
Howe, Chad
2009Revisiting perfect pathways: Trends in the grammaticalization of periphrastic pasts. In Patience Epps & Alexandre Arkhipov (eds.), New challenges in typology: Transcending the borders and refining the distinctions, 151–174. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Johanson, Stig
2001The English verb seem and its correspondences in Norwegian: What seems to be the problem? In Karin Aijmer (ed.), A Wealth of English. Studies in honour of Göran Kjellmer, 221–245. Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis.
2004The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English (PPCEME). Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania. CD-ROM, 1st edn. Available online at [URL]
2010The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Modern British English (PPCMBE). Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania. CD-ROM, 1st edn. Available online at [URL]
Kroch, Anthony & Ann Taylor
2000The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English (PPCME2). Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania. CD-ROM, 2nd edn. Available online at [URL]
Lamiroy, Béatrice
2011Degrés de grammaticalisation à travers les langues de mème famille. Mémoires de la Société de Linguistique de Paris, NS 191. 167–192.
Lamiroy, Béatrice & Walter De Mulder
2011Degrees of grammaticalization across languages. In Bernd Heine & Heiko Narrog (eds.), The Oxford handbook of grammaticalization, 302–317. Oxford: OUP.
2004Grammatikalisierung und Subjektivierung: Traugott und Langacker revisited. Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik 321. 188–209.
OED = Oxford English Dictionary Online
Oxford University Press.
Primus, Beatrice
2012Semantische Rollen. Heidelberg: Winter.
Schmidt, Wilhelm
2007Geschichte der deutschen Sprache: Ein Lehrbuch für das germanistische Studium, 10th edn. Stuttgart: Hirzel.
Stammler, Wolfgang, Karl Langosch & Kurt Ruh
1978–2007Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters. Verfasserlexikon (Vol. 1–13), 2nd edn. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Van Bogaert, Julie & Timothy Colleman
2015On the grammaticalization of (’t) schijnt ‘it seems’ as an evidential particle in colloquial Belgian Dutch. Folia Linguistica 471. 481–520.
Van Bogaert, Julie & Torsten Leuschner
2015Dutch (’t) schijnt and German scheint(’)s: On the grammaticalization of evidential particles. Studia Linguistica 691. 86–117.
Vliegen, Maurice
2011Scheinbar identisch: Niederländisch schijnen, deutsch scheinen. In Wilfried Kürschner, Reinhard Rapp, Jürg Strässler, Maurice Vliegen & Heinrich Weber (eds.), Neue linguistische Perspektiven: Festschrift für Abraham P. ten Cate, 231–244. Frankfurt: Lang.
Wiemer, Björn & Katerina Stathi
2010The database of evidential markers in European languages: A bird’s eye view of the conception of the database (the template and problems hidden beneath it). Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung (STUF) 631. 275–289.
2015On the grammaticalization of inferential evidential meaning: English seem and German scheinen. Interdisciplinary Journal for Germanic Linguistics and Semiotic Analysis, 20(2). 233–271.
Whitt, Richard J.
2018Evidentiality and propositional scope in Early Modern German. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 19(1). 122–149.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 february 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.