Over the past two decades, evidentiality—how speakers linguistically encode the information source, or evidence, for the propositions they utter—has been receiving a steadily increasing amount of interest from the linguistic community. Most evidentiality studies, however, have fo-cused on languages that encode the speaker's evidence in the verbal morphology, that is, in the grammar (see, for example, discussions of Tuyuca, a Tucanoan language spoken in parts of South America, in Aikhenvald 2004). Consequently, the Germanic languages have re-mained on the periphery of investigation into the linguistic realization of evidentiality, although here too, interest has increased over the past two decades. Diewald & Smirnova are the first to provide us with a book-length investigation into the system of German evidentials, and who provocatively argue that evidentiality is indeed an (emerging) gram-matical category in German.
In chapter 1 (Introduction), the authors discuss the basic notion of evidentiality and illustrate how certain uses of the verbs werden ‘be-come’, scheinen ‘seem’, drohen ‘threaten’, and versprechen ‘promise’ can be interpreted as serving an evidential function. This is illustrated in 1.
(1)
Diewald & Smirnova contend that, even though evidentiality in German may not (yet) be considered a full-fledged grammatical category like tense or mood, it is an extant category nonetheless: “The absence of a comprehensive system should not be treated as an argument for the absence of the category altogether” (p. 16). The prominent role of deixis is discussed, and the diachronic development of evidentiality is illus-trated within the context of grammaticalization. The authors lay forward their hypothesis that in German evidentiality should be treated as a grammatical category in its own right, and they situate their study as a corpus-based analysis in the functionalist framework.
Chapter 2 (Evidentiality—definitions and delimitations) focuses on the particulars of evidentiality as a typological category. The authors note the lack of a unified terminology among evidentialists, so they establish their own working definitions, which they use throughout the book. Then, they counter Aikhenvald's (2004) claim that European languages do not have true evidentials, noting that one cannot simply look at the end of the grammaticalization cline (that is, inflectional verb morphology) to determine whether a language has grammaticalized evidentials or not. Furthermore, they focus on semantic distinctions within the category of evidentiality, such as direct versus indirect evidence, inferential versus perceptual versus mediated information, and so on. The authors reiterate the deictic nature of evidentiality throughout the chapter, noting how the speaker's involvement is the key factor in determining whether something can be considered evidential or not.
The connection between evidentiality and modality is the focus of chapter 3 (Evidentiality and modality—drawing the lines), where the authors acknowledge a strong similarity between epistemic modality and evidentiality, insofar as the speaker's presence/deixis is concerned. However, they note a key distinction between these two categories. First, whereas epistemic modality is concerned with factuality judgments, evidentiality is concerned with information source. Second, the gram-maticalization process that gives rise to the evidential markers (werden, scheinen, drohen, versprechen) differs in several ways from the one that involves the epistemic modal verbs. In addition, the areas of apparent overlap between the two categories can be explained in terms of conversational implicature rather than inherent semantic features.
In chapter 4 (Grammar and grammaticalization), the authors discuss issues of obligatoriness and paradigmatic organization. The status of periphrastic constructions as grammatical items is taken up, and the authors employ Lehmann's (1985) grammaticalization parameters to show that grammaticality should be seen as a matter of degree rather than “either/or.”
In chapter 5 (Scales and scenarios of grammaticalization), the authors discuss types of semantic change (that is, metaphorization and metonymization), the phenomenon of image schema retention and reinterpretation, and Traugott's (1989) stages of subjectification (see also Traugott & Dasher 2002). These are seen as relevant to the gram-maticalization of the German evidentials. The authors also focus on the role of context-dependency and constructions, pointing out various context types (untypical, critical, isolating, and paradigmatic) that correspond to successive stages of the grammaticalization process (see also Diewald 2002).
Chapter 6 (The four evidential constructions in present-day German) deals with the following constructions: werden + infinitive, scheinen + zu-infinitive, drohen + zu-infinitive, and versprechen + zu-infinitive. The authors investigate issues pertaining to formal (constructional) and functional (semantic) distinctions between evidential and nonevidential uses of the four verbs.
In chapter 7 (Intermediate summary), the authors demonstrate that evidential werden ‘become’, scheinen ‘seem’, drohen ‘threaten’, and versprechen ‘promise’ form a grammatical paradigm, albeit with varying degrees of grammaticalization (werden being the most grammaticalized and versprechen the least grammaticalized). A short discussion of cross-linguistic typology is also provided.
In chapter 8 (Diachronic corpus study of the four constructions), the results of the diachronic corpus study are discussed. With each con-struction, the authors trace relevant syntactic and semantic developments through the history of German, noting how and when the relevant changes occurred for each verb. The relevant context types—discussed in chapter 5—are illustrated, and a wealth of examples is provided throughout.
In chapter 9 (Summary—the diachrony of the four constructions), the authors summarize the relevant semantic and functional changes that werden, scheinen, drohen, and versprechen underwent during the gram-maticalization process. They show how the basic semantic structure (using the source > path > goal model) of the verbs is retained despite the changes. These changes are also interpreted in light of the phenomenon of subjectification, which the authors see as a change from (self-contained) referential to text-integrative/connective to indexical-gram-matical. The role of context types is reiterated, and the authors conclude the chapter with an attempt to trace a “unified grammaticalization scen-ario” (p. 319) among the four verbs. Finally, in chapter 10 (Summary and outlook), the authors provide us with a summary of their study and some concluding remarks.
Diewald & Smirnova successfully achieve the goal of their study: They show that evidentiality is a grammatical category (or at the least, an emerging grammatical category) in German. Their methodology is grounded solidly in the functional tradition, drawing on approaches that are well established—such as Lehmann's grammaticalization parameters and Traugott's approach to subjectification—and have been used successfully in a number of other investigations. This is not to suggest that the authors' claims are not subject to modification, revision, or re-evaluation. However, this study is an excellent starting point in estab-lishing whether evidentiality is a grammatical category in German. The authors provide numerous examples to support their argument, and several tables are included as well.
One minor problem arises in the authors' discussion of peripheral evidential constructions in chapter 2. Throughout their study, Diewald & Smirnova reiterate the deictic nature of evidentiality, that is, the evidence must rest with the speaker and be expressed from his or her point of view. In their discussion of perception verbs, however, the authors pro-vide examples where the evidence does not rest with the speaker but rather with someone else. For example, in Sie hört ihn die Treppe herauf-kommen ‘She hears him coming up the staircase’ (p. 42), it appears that the auditory evidence lies with the referent of the grammatical subject (an unspecified female, 3rd person) rather than with the speaker. What evidence the speaker has for making this claim remains to be seen. Of course, this issue does not weaken Diewald & Smirnova's overall claim; it simply calls for further investigations into evidential markers in German aside from werden, scheinen, drohen, and versprechen. (A 1st person grammatical subject in the above sentence, by contrast, would have contained the deictic element necessary for evidential meaning.)
As to the structure of the book, it would have been useful to see chapter 9 (or at least parts thereof) integrated into the discussion of chapter 8. That is, in chapter 8 we are treated to a lengthy discussion of the diachronic development of the evidential markers in German, but we must wait until chapter 9 to discover the full extent of the ramifications of these developments. Had these two chapters been integrated, the discussion might have been more holistic. On the bright side, however, the current structure has the benefit of providing the reader with a succinct analysis of all four verbs together in chapter 9 (referred to as a “unified grammaticalization scenario” by the authors), so this too is only a minor criticism.
In sum, Diewald & Smirnova's study of evidentiality in German is a valuable contribution not only to the field of German(ic) linguistics, but also to the more general fields of evidentiality and grammaticalization studies, as well as to historical semantics and pragmatics.
