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Article published In:
The Rise and Development of Evidential and Epistemic Markers
Edited by Silvio Cruschina and Eva-Maria Remberger
[Journal of Historical Linguistics 7:1/2] 2017
► pp. 9–47

Evidential adverbs in German

Diachronic development and present-day meaning

| University of Tübingen
| University of Tübingen
This article addresses the semantic and morphosyntactic development of the German evidential adverbs offensichtlich, offenbar, anscheinend, and scheinbar ‘obviously’/‘apparently’/‘seemingly’ and their meaning contribution in present-day German. It will be argued that these expressions, most of which are historically derived from adjectives, innovated separate lexical entries as sentence adverbs in New High German resulting from a morphosyntactic reanalysis of an ambiguous surface structure. This reanalysis was accompanied by a profound semantic change, as a result of which the expressions acquired a wide-scope reading of the type ‘there is (clear) evidence that p’. The diachronic results are corroborated by experimental data from Present-Day German that show that these evidential sentence adverbs are underspecified with respect to evidence type (inference and report). The diachronic and synchronic findings are furthermore discussed in the light of grammaticalization and subjectification theory.
Keywords: evidentiality, evidential adverbials, adverbs, German, grammaticalization, reanalysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.General diachronic development
  • 3. Scheinbar and scheinen in Old and Middle High German
  • 4.Development into sentence adverbs
    • 4.1Interpretation of sentence adverbials
    • 4.2Ambiguity as a source of reanalysis
    • 4.3Syntactic reanalysis and the grammar of adverbials
  • 5.Meaning contribution in Present-Day German
    • 5.1Evidence type and degree of reliability
    • 5.2Evidence type: Corpus examples
    • 5.3Evidence type and degree of reliability: A study on acceptability in context
      • Predictions
      • 5.3.1Method
        • Participants
        • Design
        • Materials
        • Procedure
        • Data analysis
      • 5.3.2Results
      • 5.3.3General discussion
      • 5.3.4Evidentiality
  • 6.Metaphorization, subjectification, and grammaticalization
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Primary sources
  • References
Published online: 23 November 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.7.1-2.02axe
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