Auditory evidentiality in English and German: The case of perception verbs

Evidentiality, the linguistic encoding of speakerʹs information source, is an understudied phenomenon in languages such as English and German, which do not encode evidential meaning in the grammar. However, there are several lexical means by which speakers of these languages can encode their source of information. It should thus come as no surprise that perception verbs – those verbs that denote sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste – are one of the most frequently used markers of evidentiality in English and German, for perception shapes most (if not all) of our epistemology. Although most studies of perception verbs have focused on vision, the primary sensory modality, this study will focus on hearing, the second most prominent sensory modality. That is, this will be a study of how verbs of auditory perception are used by speakers of English and German to indicate how hearing serves as evidence for the propositions they utter. A corpus-based analysis of English hear and sound, as well as German hören ‘hear’ and klingen ‘sound’ was conducted, and two aspects of the findings are examined: the specific construction types in which these verbs of auditory perception are used evidentially, and what specific evidential meanings are bound to these constructions.