Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Article (142)
- Review (19)
- Monograph/Edited Volume (18)
- Part of a Book (7)
- Postprint (4)
- Doctoral Thesis (2)
- Other (2)
- Habilitation Thesis (1)
- Part of Periodical (1)
Language
- English (196) (remove)
Keywords
- evidentiality (4)
- 1799-1804 (3)
- Spanish (3)
- Wilhelm von Humboldt (3)
- epistemic modality (3)
- language contact (3)
- literatures of the world (3)
- Aufklärung (2)
- Berlin (2)
- Cognitive Construction Grammar (2)
Institute
- Institut für Romanistik (196) (remove)
Humboldtian science aims at an empirically supported transdisciplinary and at the same time transareal development of a world consciousness. In the development of this world consciousness, not only Europe and the Americas, but also Central Asia and especially China play an important role. The Humboldt Center for Transdisciplinary Studies (HCTS) in Changsha, is attempting to address the fact that China has been largely left out of international Humboldt studies and that Alexander von Humboldt was intensively engaged with Central Asia and China for decades. Therefore, the Humboldt Center in Changsha sets itself the goal of expanding Humboldt Studies to include this important aspect, to stimulate and coordinate special research work, and to build scientific and cultural bridges between Germany and China, Europe and Asia.
In recent years, the category of evidentiality has also come into use for the description of Romance languages and of German. This has been contingent on a change in its interpretation from a typological category to a semantic-pragmatic category, which allows an application to languages lacking specialised morphemes for the expression of evidentiality. We consider evidentiality to be a structural dimension of grammar, the values of which are expressed by types of constructions that code the source of information which a speaker imparts. If we look at the situation in Romance languages and in German, drawing a boundary between epistemic modality and evidentiality presents problems that are difficult to solve. Adding markers of the source of the speaker’s knowledge often limits the degree of responsibility of the speaker for the content of the utterance. Evidential adverbs are a frequently used means of marking the source of the speaker’s knowledge. The evidential meaning is generalised to marking any source of knowledge, what can be regarded as a result of a process of pragmaticalisation. The use of certain means which also carry out evidential markings can even contribute to the blurring of the different kinds of evidentiality. German also has modal verbs which in conjunction with the perfect tense of the verb have a predominantly evidential use (sollen and wollen). But even here the evidential marking is not without influence on the modality of the utterance. The Romance languages, however, do not have such specialised verbs for expressing evidentiality in certain contexts. To do this, they mark evidentiality – often context bound – by verb forms such as the conditional and the imperfect tense. This article shall contrast the different architectures used in expressing evidentiality in German and in the Romance languages.
The present paper discusses the relationship between evidentiality and (inter-) subjectivity and argues that the two semantic-functional categories need not be mutually exclusive. In the use of certain means of expression and in certain contexts, both evidentiality and (inter-) subjectivity may be conveyed simultaneously. I thereby differentiate between two meanings of intersubjectivity, namely ‘intersubjectivity1’ and ‘intersubjectivity2’. Intersubjectivity1 refers to the notion of common or general knowledge: certain means of expression are seen as being intersubjectively used when the speaker shares or assumes sharing knowledge with the interlocutor. Intersubjectivity2 is related to particular discourse functions of certain means of expression in interactional settings, paying attention to the speaker-hearer constellation.
In order to substantiate the theoretical part of the paper, I then present a qualitative analysis of Portuguese, Spanish and English examples, which are taken from the Corpus do Português, Corpus del Español and the Corpus of Contemporary American English.
In this paper evidential and modal adverbs will be studied, such as French apparemment, évidemment, visiblement, Italian apparentemente, evidentemente, ovviamente, and Spanish aparentemente, evidentemente and visiblemente. The development of their signification will be discussed, including German adverbs like offensichtlich. In these means of expression, the functional-semantic categories evidentiality and epistemic modality seem to overlap: on the one hand, they are used if the state of affairs talked about cannot be verified, that is, if there is still a moment of insecurity concerning the transmitted information. Then adverbials with a special structure (preposition + article + nominal form of a verb) will be analysed, and we will examine if they behave in the same way.