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.

Studies in diachronic linguistics increasingly acknowledge that linguistic change is highly context-dependent and somehow tied to constructions as linguistic units. This is the first volume to investigate the role of constructions and the potential of constructional approaches in linguistic change. The contributions in this volume comprise both theoretical and empirical studies, all of which are accessible for a general audience. While some contributions explicitly aim at comparing and unifying concepts from both traditional grammatical theories and recent construction grammar approaches, others offer detailed case studies of exemplary problems from a constructional point of view. The papers offer a cross-linguistic perspective and deal with a number of different language families, ranging from Germanic to Austronesian.

This introduction centres mainly around a discussion of the theory, methods and work-fields of research into grammaticalization and its application to selected problems of German. The following theoretical aspects are dealt with: distinctive features of grammatical signs, the structure of grammatical categories, degrees of grammaticalization, grammaticalization scales, cognitive and communicative strategies, grammaticalization cycles, and the links between grammaticalization theory and research into language change. Four extensive case studies on the German language revolve around grammaticalization phenomena in connection with modal verbs, the passive with bekommen, prepositions, and modal particles.

Die verschiedenen Funktionen der Modalverben durfen, koennen, moegen, mussen, sollen und wollen werden im Rahmen der Grammatikalisierungstheorie untersucht, wobei sowohl das synchrone System als auch seine diachrone Entwicklung berucksichtigt werden. Im Zentrum des Interesses steht die im Laufe der Sprachgeschichte des Deutschen erfolgte Grammatikalisierung der Modalverben als Faktizitatsmarker, also zum Ausdruck einer sprecherbasierten Einschatzung der Faktizitat des dargestellten Sachverhalts, wie in Sie muss zuhause gewesen sein. Der synchrone Teil der Arbeit gibt eine systematische Beschreibung der verschiedenen Gebrauchsweisen der Modalverben nach ihrem jeweiligen Grammatikalisierungsgrad. Der diachrone Teil zeichnet zum einen die semantische Entwicklung der weniger grammatikalisierten Gebrauchsweisen der Modalverben seit dem Althochdeutschen nach, zum anderen entwirft er ein Phasenmodell zum Ablauf der Entstehung der grammatikalisierten Varianten. Dieses Modell wird an jedem der sechs Modalverblexeme uberpruft, und es wird ein einheitlicher Grammatikalisierungsweg fur die Modalverben nachgewiesen. Die Ergebnisse werden durch die Auswertung von Textkorpora aus verschiedenen diachronen Stufen des Deutschen untermauert.