Evidentiality and Perception Verbs in English and German

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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.

Autorentext

The Author: Richard J. Whitt holds a Ph.D. in Germanic Linguistics from the University of California at Berkeley. He has also studied Germanic Linguistics at the University of Georgia, Georgia State University, Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, and Leibniz Universität Hannover. He currently works as a research associate on the GerManC Project at the University of Manchester.

Klappentext

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.

Inhalt
Contents: Evidentiality and Perception Verbs Sensory Modalities Perception Verb Typology and Hierarchy Polysemy Metaphor Metonymy Subjectivity Intersubjectivity Stance and Engagement Bleaching and Grammaticalization Text Type Complementation Constructions Corpus Study Visual Perception Auditory Perception Tactile Perception Olfactory Perception Gustatory Perception.