Abstract
This paper investigates certain uses of the German modal verb wollen ‘will, want’ (dubbed WILL) in which it relates non-firsthand information to a source, a function comparable to that of both reportive evidentiality and reported speech. The latter distinction is reframed in terms of a reportive-quotative opposition, and based on corpus-driven analysis the paper argues that WILL displays a combination of traits that warrant it the composite label “quoportive”. It is concluded that WILL, in its hybridity, is evidence for the existence of a category called “referral” which captures what is shared between evidentiality and reported speech.
© 2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Editorial
- Frames and constructions enhance text coherence: The case of DNI resolutions in spoken discourse
- Information status and English relative constructions: A corpus-based study of Japanese learners in spoken language
- Key is a llave is a Schlüssel: A failure to replicate an experiment from Boroditsky et al. 2003
- Illness-conceptions in the persuasive sections of Hungarian medical recipes from the 16th and 17th centuries
- Figurative processes in meaning interpretation: A case study of novel English compounds
- Romance verb-noun-conversions from a cognitive perspective
- Geographic variation of quite + ADJ in twenty national varieties of English: A pilot study
- A usage-based study of the just me construction
- German es – a Construction Grammar approach
- wollen: On the verge between quotative and reportive evidential
- Variation between singular and plural subject-verb agreement in German: A usage-based approach
- More on the as-predicative: Granularity issues in the description of construction networks
- Constructing a schema: Word-class changing morphology in a usage-based perspective
- Idiosyncrasies and generalizations: Argument structure, semantic roles and the valency realization principle
Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Editorial
- Frames and constructions enhance text coherence: The case of DNI resolutions in spoken discourse
- Information status and English relative constructions: A corpus-based study of Japanese learners in spoken language
- Key is a llave is a Schlüssel: A failure to replicate an experiment from Boroditsky et al. 2003
- Illness-conceptions in the persuasive sections of Hungarian medical recipes from the 16th and 17th centuries
- Figurative processes in meaning interpretation: A case study of novel English compounds
- Romance verb-noun-conversions from a cognitive perspective
- Geographic variation of quite + ADJ in twenty national varieties of English: A pilot study
- A usage-based study of the just me construction
- German es – a Construction Grammar approach
- wollen: On the verge between quotative and reportive evidential
- Variation between singular and plural subject-verb agreement in German: A usage-based approach
- More on the as-predicative: Granularity issues in the description of construction networks
- Constructing a schema: Word-class changing morphology in a usage-based perspective
- Idiosyncrasies and generalizations: Argument structure, semantic roles and the valency realization principle