This paper aims to contribute to the debates
about the nature of the speaker-related meanings of the mental state
predicates, on the basis of a diachronic corpus study into the semantic
evolution of five such verbs in Dutch. The analyses show that each of these
verbs develops its own spe-cific profile in terms of a limited set of clearly
distinguishable speaker-related meanings, viz. epistemic modality,
evidentiality, and ‘subjectivi-ty’. Each of these meanings is moreover
characterized by a distinctive di-achronic path. The study thus also
demonstrates the independent status of ‘subjectivity’ as a meaning category.
This paper presents an investigation into the diachrony of the parenthetical uses of the mental state verb denken ‘think’ in Dutch. It reviews the literature on the emergence of parentheticals, which predominantly focuses on English. Supported by a systematic diachronic corpus study, it argues that the facts of Dutch (in particular: its word order properties, which are quite different from those in English) are not obviously in line with the most important traditional views (including the well know hypothesis that the parentheticals are the result of a reduction of the full complementing use of the relevant verbs). Instead, the data offer arguments for an alternative hypothesis: the parentheticals may originate in a combination of two main clauses, of the kind present in direct quote expressions (as in I thought: Oh no, he is doing it again).
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