Linguistic Realization of Evidentiality in European Languages
The book offers the first collection of papers which explicitly deal with the linguistic realization of evidentiality in European languages. The contributions summarize relevant previous research and develop new perspectives on the view of evidentiality.
This book makes an original contribution to the understanding of perception verbs and the treatment of argument structure, and offers new insights on lexical causation, evidentiality, and processes of cognition. Perception verbs - such as look, see, taste, hear, feel, sound, and listen - present unresolved problems for theories of lexical semantics. This book examines the relations between their semantics and syntactic behaviour, the different kinds of polysemy they exhibit, and the role of evidentiality in verbs like seem and sound.
In a number of languages, scattered across the world, every statement must contain a specification of the type of evidence on which it is based - whether the speaker saw it, or heard it, or inferred it from indirect evidence, or learnt it from somebody else. Of interest to any grammarian, the book discusses evidentiality, and the cognitive and sociolinguistic consequences of evidentiality in a language.