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Article published In: The Rise and Development of Evidential and Epistemic Markers
Edited by Silvio Cruschina and Eva-Maria Remberger
[Journal of Historical Linguistics 7:1/2] 2017
► pp. 190–212

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The grammaticalization of Dutch klinken

 | University of Oxford
Published online: 23 November 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.7.1-2.08poo
Abstract
This article demonstrates the diachronic development of present-day Dutch klinken as an evidential copular verb meaning ‘to seem, based on (auditory) evidence’ from the Middle Dutch intransitive verb klinken meaning ‘to give off a clear sound’. I identify four semantic stages in the history of klinken, which are divided by processes of semantic bleaching (14th–16th century, 16th–17th century) and subjectification and copularization (during the 16th century). I claim that the process of copularization is the trigger of both the evidential meaning and the subjective interpretation that copular constructions with klinken receive. Furthermore, I show that, unlike the development of eruitzien ‘look’ and voelen ‘feel’ from cognitive perception verbs, klinken has developed much like the Dutch copular verbs schijnen ‘seem’ and blijken ‘turn out’: from an intransitive verb with a sensory-related meaning.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Evidentiality
    • 2.1Evidentiality and evidential categories
    • 2.2Lexical and grammatical evidentials
  • 3. Klinken in Present-Day Dutch
    • 3.1Descriptive perception verbs
    • 3.2Constructions and their interpretations
      • 3.2.1Adjectival complements
      • 3.2.2Prepositional complements +  NP
      • 3.2.3Prepositional complements +  CP
  • 4.History of klinken
    • 4.1Corpora
    • 4.2Early usage
    • 4.3Semantic change
    • 4.4Syntactic change
  • 5.The grammaticalization of evidential interpretations
  • 6.Source of copularized verbs
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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