hide
Free keywords:
-
Abstract:
Ever since the category of evidentiality has been identified in the verbal grammar of
certain languages, it has been assumed that evidentiality plays no role in the grammars
of those languages that have not incorporated it into their verb morphology or at least
their verb clusters. The present paper attempts to show that even if evidentiality is not
visible in the verbal grammar of English and Dutch, it appears to be a motivating factor,
both historically and synchronically, in the process whereby evidential predicates are
made to play a subordinate syntactic role with regard to their embedded subject clause.
This process, known as AUXILIATION (Kuteva 2001), appears to manifest itself in a variety
of, often successive, grammatical processes or rules, such as Subject-to-Subject Raising
(the subject of the embedded clause becomes the subject of the main verb, as in John is
likely to be late), V-ING (as in The man stopped breathing), Incorporation-by-Lowering
(the evidential main verb is lowered on to the V-constituent of the embedded subject
clause, as in John may have left), or Incorporation-by-Raising (also known as Predicate
Raising), not or hardly attested in English but dominant in Dutch. A list is provided of
those English (and Dutch) predicates that induce one of the above-mentioned
auxiliation rules and it is checked how many of those have an evidential meaning. This is
set off against evidential predicates that do not induce an auxiliation rule. It results that,
for English and Dutch, lexical evidentiality is a powerful determinant for the induction
of syntactic auxiliation.
