Evidentiality and propositional scope in Early Modern German

Abstract

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.

Indirect evidentiality in Dutch and German: a contrastive corpus study of the seem-type verbs schijnen and scheinen

“…In type (v), the seemtype verb functions as the matrix verb in a complement construction introduced by the 'factive' complementizer dass/dat 'that', the comparative complementizer als (ob) 'as if' (only possible in German) or a zero complementizer (again only possible in German). Whereas Diewald & Smirnova (2010) do not consider the evidential potential of this construction type, Whitt (2015Whitt ( , 2017 argues that complement clause constructions are equally capable of expressing evidential meaning as zu-infinitive constructions (see also De Haan 2007, 141 for a similar claim). In fact, with a 'factive' that-complement, the seem-type verb can easily be interpreted as scoping over a proposition, so that it can develop into an evidential marker expressing that the proposition in its scope is either inferred or reported.…”

“…As a copular verb, in the complement construction and when used parenthetically, scheinen is said to convey the meaning of "(visual) impression, to be seemingly, to appear (as)" (Diewald & Smirnova 2010, 180). In this paper, however, I side with Whitt (2015Whitt ( , 2017 and take the evidential potential of all constructional environments into account, especially those in which the seem-type verb clearly has propositional scope. 4 A second issue adding to the complexity of a semantic characterization of seem-type verbs is the fact that they can either express inference, hearsay or can be vague with respect to these values.…”

“…One could either argue that scheint expresses that the speaker infers that the father has a girlfriend (on the basis of what the son Gabriel has said) or that German scheint in this example is in fact reportive, as no real inferencing is involved -since the son has explicitly spoken about the girlfriend. As a copula, scheinen can invite an inferential reading; in this case, propositional scope is semantically coerced (see Whitt 2015Whitt , 2017Boye 2012).…”

Using corpora to track changing thought styles: evidentiality, epistemology, and Early Modern English and German scientific discourse

“…Here, previous work on seem and scheinen (Aijmer 2009;Diewald & Smirnova 2010;Whitt 2015), perception verbs (Whitt 2010;Whitt 2017), and various adverbs (Biber & Finegan 1989;Downing 2001) provides useful guides as to which items serve evidential functions. On the other hand, recent "bottomup" analyses of evidentiality (Bednarek 2006;Gloning 2011;Grund 2012Grund , 2013Whitt 2016) It is acknowledged that there may be some overlap at certain period boundaries in the corpora: in English at 1700, for example, due to the presence of texts from 1700 in both EMEMT and ARCHER, and the fifty-year demarcations of the GerManC Corpus provide similar potential for overlap (although in practice this meant only a single text published in 1700 placed in the 1650-1700 rather than the 1700-1750 group).…”

Copy Raising in English, German, and Dutch: Synchrony and Diachrony

“…Following this pattern, English is hypothesized to behave differently from German, and Dutch is hypothesized to behave at times like English and at times like German. The motivation behind this hypothesis is that copy raising is seen as a far advanced stage along a grammaticalization cline, one that appears to be similar in German (Diewald & Smirnova 2010, Whitt 2015, 2016) and English (De Haan 2007, Gisborne & Holmes 2007, Whitt 2016). Since, according to Van Haeringen's theory, English should be the most progressive and German the most conservative of the three languages, with Dutch appearing in between, it is hypothesized that English is further on this grammaticalization cline than Dutch, and both are further than German.…”