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Evidentiality and Perception Verbs in English and German

Whitt, Richard

Authors



Abstract

Evidentiality, the linguistic encoding of a speaker’s or writer’s evidence for an asserted proposition, has begun to receive serious attention from linguists only in the last quarter century. Much of this attention has focused on languages that encode evidentiality in the grammar, while much less interest has been shown in languages that express evidentiality through means other than inflectional morphology. In English and German, for instance, the verbs of perception – those verbs denoting sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste – are prime carriers of evidential meaning. This study surveys the most prominent of the perception verbs in English and German across all five sensory modalities and accounts for the range of evidential meanings by examining the general polysemy found among perception verbs, as well as the specific complementation patterns in which these verbs occur.

Citation

Whitt, R. (2010). Evidentiality and Perception Verbs in English and German. Peter Lang. https://doi.org/10.3726/978-3-0353-0306-3

Book Type Monograph
Publication Date 2010
Deposit Date Aug 19, 2024
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
ISBN 9783034301527
DOI https://doi.org/10.3726/978-3-0353-0306-3
Keywords Intersubjectivity, Olfactory,Perception, Polysemy, Metonymy, Sensory Modalities
Public URL https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/38384013
Publisher URL https://www.peterlang.com/document/1051967