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Article published In:
Journal of Historical Pragmatics
Vol. 19:1 (2018) ► pp.122–149

Evidentiality and propositional scope in Early Modern German

 | University of Nottingham, UK
This paper provides an overview of verbal markers of evidentiality in Early Modern German (1650 to 1800) in light of Boye’s propositional scope hypothesis. The markers under investigation include the semi-auxiliary scheinen (‘to shine, appear, seem’) and the perception verbs sehen (‘see’) and hören (‘hear’). I show that, although Boye’s hypothesis sheds new light on and calls into question previous diachronic accounts of scheinen, it appears not to account fully for why cases where perception verbs do not scope over propositions are also found with evidential readings in light of the larger discourse context. I will show that Boye’s hypothesis is still feasible when such contexts are taken into account. Data are drawn from the German Manchester Corpus (GerManC), a representative multi-register corpus of Early Modern German from 1650 to 1800.
Keywords: Early Modern German, evidentiality, propositional scope
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Evidentiality in German
  • 3.The data: The GerManC corpus
  • 4.Results and analysis
    • 4.1Inferential evidentiality and grammaticalization: The case of scheinen
      • 4.1.1Copulas and the zu-infinitive construction
      • 4.1.2Complement clauses and parentheticals
      • 4.1.3Summary of scheinen
    • 4.2Lexical evidentials: The perception verbs sehen and hören
      • 4.2.1Complement clauses and parentheticals
      • 4.2.2Direct object + infinitive constructions
      • 4.2.3External constructions
      • 4.2.4Summary of sehen and hören
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 August 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.00013.whi
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