Evidentiality and propositional scope in early modern German

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.’...

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Main Author: Whitt, Richard J.
Format: Article
Published: John Benjamins 2018
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Online Access:https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/39145/
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author Whitt, Richard J.
author_facet Whitt, Richard J.
author_sort Whitt, Richard J.
building Nottingham Research Data Repository
collection Online Access
description 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.
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spelling nottingham-391452020-05-04T19:59:35Z https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/39145/ Evidentiality and propositional scope in early modern German Whitt, Richard J. 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. John Benjamins 2018-08-10 Article PeerReviewed Whitt, Richard J. (2018) Evidentiality and propositional scope in early modern German. Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 19 (1). pp. 122-149. ISSN 1569-9854 Evidentiality Early Modern German Propositional Scope https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/jhp.00013.whi doi:10.1075/jhp.00013.whi doi:10.1075/jhp.00013.whi
spellingShingle Evidentiality
Early Modern German
Propositional Scope
Whitt, Richard J.
Evidentiality and propositional scope in early modern German
title Evidentiality and propositional scope in early modern German
title_full Evidentiality and propositional scope in early modern German
title_fullStr Evidentiality and propositional scope in early modern German
title_full_unstemmed Evidentiality and propositional scope in early modern German
title_short Evidentiality and propositional scope in early modern German
title_sort evidentiality and propositional scope in early modern german
topic Evidentiality
Early Modern German
Propositional Scope
url https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/39145/
https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/39145/
https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/39145/