Evidentiality in German

German, just like English and Dutch, has no obligatory grammatical category of evidentiality, which means that the realisations of the semantic functional domain of evidentiality are mostly lexical and typically optional. Despite this optionality, a remarkably large inventory of expressions is used to refer to a source of information, among which modal verbs (e.g. sollen ‘be said to’, müssen ‘must’, wollen ‘claim’), SEEM-type verbs (scheinen ‘seem’), sentence adverbs (e.g. offensichtlich ‘obviously’, augenscheinlich ‘visibly’) and prepositions referring to reportive sources (laut, zufolge, nach ‘according to’). This broad category of evidential expressions often also conveys epistemic meanings, or more generally, meanings related to the expression of speaker stance and commitment, to which we will also pay some atten

ISBN:978-3-11-072601-5

Publication year:2022

Keywords:H1 Book chapter

Accessibility:Closed