Evidentiality and propositional scope in early modern German

Whitt, Richard J.

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of verbal markers of evidentiality in Early Modern German (1650-1800) 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.’ It is shown that, although Boye’s hypothesis sheds new light on and calls into question previous diachronic accounts of scheinen, it appears not to fully account for why cases where perception verbs do not scope over propositions are also found with evidential readings in light of the larger discourse context. It will be shown 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.

Citation

Whitt, R. J. (2018). Evidentiality and propositional scope in early modern German. Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 19(1), 122–149. https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.00013.whi

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Nov 28, 2015
• Online Publication Date: Aug 10, 2018
• Publication Date: Aug 10, 2018
• Deposit Date: Dec 7, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Aug 10, 2018
• Journal: Journal of Historical Pragmatics
• Print ISSN: 1566-5852
• Electronic ISSN: 1569-9854
• Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 19
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 122–149
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.00013.whi
• Keywords: Evidentiality; Early Modern German; Propositional Scope
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/971398
• Publisher URL: https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/jhp.00013.whi
• Additional Information: Article is under copyright and John Benjamins should be contacted for permission to re-use or reprint the material in any form.