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.
This study investigates diachronic trends in the use of evidential markers in Early Modern English medical treatises (1500-1700), with data drawn from the Corpus of Early Modern English Medical Texts. The state of medical thought and practice in Early Modern England is discussed, with particular focus on the changing role that Scholasticism played during this period. The nature of evidentiality and types of scholastic vs. non-scholastic evidence are given attention, and quantitative results are outlined. It is shown that as scholastic models of medicine gave way to more empirically-driven approaches, the use of evidential markers indicating direct perceptual and inferential evidence increased drastically, while the use of markers signaling reported information -particularly information mediated by classical authorities -decreased significantly. The results are finally discussed in light of discursive and typological considerations relating to contextual changes accompanying the reference to classical authors as sources of evidence, as well as the notion of "marked" and "unmarked" evidence types.
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