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Evidentiality and propositional scope in early modern German

Whitt, Richard J.

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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.
Contract Date Dec 7, 2016

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