Relativism and Universalism in Linguistics - Fachbereich 10 ...

162 Workshops
rather intricate system of mood marking is generally associated with the coding of indirect
speech (descriptions of this system can be found in the Dudengrammar or the IDS-grammar).
This is, however, only part of the story, as the rendering of direct speech in a less direct way
can take up many forms, some of which are more grammatical(ized) than others.
In my talk, I want to focus on the distribution and meaning of both mood and modal verbs
from a contrastive point of view. More specifically, I want to look at indirect speech
phenomena in German and Dutch. As only relicts of the original Dutch mood system can be
found in present-day Dutch, mood distinctions are generally not used to mark indirect speech,
at least not in the same way as in German. A somewhat hybrid status can be claimed to exist
for zou, however, which – following De Haan (2000), is a subjunctive form expressing
“indirect evidentiality”. More specifically, De Haan claims that zou, just like the present
conjunctive in German, expresses unconfirmed events, whereas modals like German sollen
and Dutch moeten are purely evidential, in that their function consists in showing “that the
speaker has only indirect evidence for his or her statement”. An alternative position would be
to view Dutch zou in its evidential use as the cognate of German sollen – what it shares with
sollen is, for one thing, a clear preference for main-clause use. Other elements to be
considered in this respect are the extent to which the information is presented from the point
of view of the reporting speaker (or the reporting speaker, see e.g. ten Cate 1996) and the
extent to which the source of information is explicitly presented with both sollen and zou.
With German sollen, the source of information can be mentioned, but is usually absent; the
situation of zou is unclear in this respect.
Corpus analysis of German and Dutch data (the corpus being restricted to journalistic prose)
will reveal to what extent De Haan’s observations pertain.
References
ten Cate, Abraham P (1996): “Modality of verb forms in German reported speech”. In:
Janssen, Theo A.J.M & Wim van der Wurff (eds.). Reported Speech: Forms and
Functions of the Verb. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, John Benjamins. 189 - 211.
De Haan, Ferdinand (2000): “The Relation between Modality and Evidentiality” Linguistische
Berichte. Sonderheft 00/2000.
Willett, Thomas(1988): “A cross-linguistic survey of the grammaticization of evidentiality”.
Studies in Language 12:1. 51 - 97.
The evidential space:
A conceptual analysis
Nuyts, Jan
University of Antwerp
jan.nuyts@ua.ac.be
This paper will offer a ‘conceptual analysis’ of the status of evidentiality in the system of
‘tense-aspect-modality’ categories or ‘qualificational’ categories more in general, with special
focus on its relation to the modal categories, and most specifically to epistemic modality. It
will wonder whether evidentiality should really be treated as one coherent category, and
whether it should not rather be dissolved and split into a number of independent
subcategories, each with quite different semantic properties (e.g. presence or absence of a
scale, effects of/on speaker commitment), and with a quite different conceptual status, viz. (at
least) the categories of inferentiality, reasoning and related notions (which possibly belong
under the umbrella of the ‘attitudinal categories’ quite like, among others, epistemic modality
– even if they should not be included in or joined with the latter: they share several properties
with epistemic modality, but are nevertheless semantically distinct), of hearsay, and of