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Evidentiality Revisited: Cognitive grammar, functional and discourse-pragmatic perspectives
Edited by Juana I. Marín-Arrese, Gerda Haßler and Marta Carretero
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 271] 2017
► pp. 149–169

Chapter 6
A synchronic and diachronic study of the Dutch Auxiliary “Zou(den)”

| University of Münster/University of Antwerp

This contribution presents the results of a corpus based investigation of the Dutch auxiliary zou(den). The synchronic and diachronic study demonstrates that the auxiliary can express nine meanings since the oldest language stages, and that its meaning has specialized to hypotheticality. Furthermore, the paper focuses on the evidential function and discusses some grammatical and contextual features that support an evidential interpretation. It is highly probable that linguistic features such as a source reference and the grammatical construction have contributed to the evolution of an evidential meaning.

Keywords: modal auxiliaries, evidentiality, semantic change, Dutch
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Modal auxiliaries and the framework
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1The meaning categories
    • 4.2The semantic development of zou(den)
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1 Zou(den) as an evidential marker
    • 5.2The presence of source references
    • 5.3Grammatical and semantic features of evidential zou(den)
    • 5.4The evolution of the evidential meaning
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 21 March 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.271.07har
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