This book presents a selection of contributions to the workshop "Linguistic realization of evidentiality in European languages", held at the 30th Annual Convention of the German Society of Linguistics in Bamberg (February 27-29, 2008), and additional papers, which have been especially commissioned for this volume. Its main focus lies on providing further empirical evidence about languages that have various - lexical as well as grammatical - evidential expressions. The papers in this volume will offer a cross-linguistic perspective on this topic as they deal with a number of different language families and languages: Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian), Germanic languages (Dutch, German, English, Icelandic), Baltic and Slavic languages, Greek, Basque, and Turkish.

This book is a comprehensive study of the evidential system in German. It presents a systematic description of the encoding of evidentiality in present-day German, as well as a diachronic reconstruction of the relevant sources and paths of grammaticalization from the Old High German period onwards. Based on empirical corpus research, the study investigates the degree of grammaticalization of each single evidential construction and the make-up of the present-day system as well as the diachronic stages that lead to the present state. The book focuses on three main issues. First, it is concerned with the general notion of evidentiality, its deictic character, and with the interrelations between the domains of evidentiality and epistemic modality. Second, the book presents the results of the synchronic corpus-based analysis of the German evidential periphrastic constructions werden 'become' + infinitive, scheinen 'seem', drohen 'threaten', versprechen 'promise' + zu 'to'- infinitive, which constitute a paradigm for coding evidentiality in Present Day German. Third, the diachronic development of the evidential constructions is represented as a complex grammaticalization process, interacting with the development of modal constructions and leading to a highly differentiated category of modal and evidential distinctions in the grammar of German.

While much attention has been devoted to simple nominal relators, especially prepositions and case markers, complex nominal relators have not yet been the focus of a systematic and cross-linguistic study. The chapters of this volume provide not only a working definition of such constructions, but also a description of complex adpositions and other complex nominal relators in a variety of European languages, both Indo-European and non-Indo-European, including some languages for which this phenomenon had received little attention, such as Breton and Albanian. Building on synchronic and diachronic corpus-based investigations, the authors show commonalities and specificities of these linguistic items across languages, trying to explain why and how they emerged. The research presented in this volume confirms the wide-spread use of complex adpositions in Europe, and the data reviewed in the final discussion suggests it might be the same in other parts of the world, as well. This book thus offers not only detailed descriptions of complex nominal relators in fifteen languages, but also indications of what to look for in other languages, and how to distinguish between a syntactically free sequence and a genuine complex nominal relator.

Die Arbeit zielt auf eine systematische Beschreibung verschiedener Lesarten von wurde + Infinitiv unter Berucksichtigung sowohl synchroner als auch diachroner Aspekte dieser Erscheinung. Die zentrale Hypothese ist, dass dieser Periphrase eine grundlegende semantische Basisstruktur zugrunde liegt und dass sich das Spektrum ihrer Gebrauchsweisen als je spezifische Realisierung dieser Basisstruktur darstellen lasst. Die Bedeutungsschablone ist kompositionell aus zwei Komponenten aufgebaut: das sind die evidentielle werden-Komponente und die modale Konjunktiv II-Komponente. Die unterschiedliche kontextinduzierte Realisierung dieser beiden Bedeutungskomponenten fuhrt zur Entstehung distinktiver Lesarten von wurde + Infinitiv. Auf der Grundlage der synchron erarbeiteten semantischen Basisstruktur wird die diachrone Entwicklung der Konstruktion als ein verzweigter Grammatikalisierungsprozess in seinen wichtigen Ablaufphasen beschrieben. Es wird nachgewiesen, dass das heutige Deutsch zwei distinktive Lesarten dieser Fugung mit unterschiedlichen Grammatikalisierungsgraden aufweist. Die Ergebnisse werden durch die Auswertung von zwei diachronen Textkorpora (zum Gegenwartsdeutschen und zum Fruhneuhochdeutschen) untermauert.