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On Diversity and Complexity of Languages Spoken in Europe and North and Central Asia
Edited by Pirkko Suihkonen and Lindsay J. Whaley
[Studies in Language Companion Series 164] 2014
► pp. 311–338

Kinds of evidentiality in German complement clauses

| Samara State Academy of Social Sciences and Humanities

This paper continues my previous work on German complement clauses published in Russia (Gundareva & Kostrova 2005). I developed a system of oppositions between the kinds of reported, evoked and demonstrative evidence in present-day German complement clauses and identified the markers forming these distinctions and their interrelation. Here, viewing complement clauses as the product of complex speech acts, I focus on the locution level, analyzing the functions and semantics of noun and verb phrases in the main and complement clauses and their grammatical description. The system of oppositions that emerges reflects several kinds of evidentiality: quotative vs. indefinite, evoked vs. cited, effective vs. conjectural, acquired through perceived vs. inferred, referred-to-subject vs. referred-to-subject and narrator.

Keywords: complement clauses, evidentiality, kinds, markers
Published online: 17 December 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.164.11kos
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