The grammaticalization of Dutch klinken
This article demonstrates the diachronic development of present-day Dutch klinken as an evidential copular verb meaning ‘to seem, based on (auditory) evidence’ from the Middle Dutch intransitive verb klinken meaning ‘to give off a clear sound’. I identify four semantic stages in the history of klinken, which are divided by processes of semantic bleaching (14th–16th century, 16th–17th century) and subjectification and copularization (during the 16th century). I claim that the process of copularization is the trigger of both the evidential meaning and the subjective interpretation that copular constructions with klinken receive. Furthermore, I show that, unlike the development of eruitzien ‘look’ and voelen ‘feel’ from cognitive perception verbs, klinken has developed much like the Dutch copular verbs schijnen ‘seem’ and blijken ‘turn out’: from an intransitive verb with a sensory-related meaning.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Evidentiality
- 2.1Evidentiality and evidential categories
- 2.2Lexical and grammatical evidentials
- 3.
Klinken in Present-Day Dutch
- 3.1Descriptive perception verbs
- 3.2Constructions and their interpretations
- 3.2.1Adjectival complements
- 3.2.2Prepositional complements + NP
- 3.2.3Prepositional complements + CP
- 4.History of klinken
- 4.1Corpora
- 4.2Early usage
- 4.3Semantic change
- 4.4Syntactic change
- 5.The grammaticalization of evidential interpretations
- 6.Source of copularized verbs
- 7.Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
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