Evidentiality and perception verbs in English and German: A corpus-based analysis from the early modern period to the present

Perception verbs---those verbs denoting sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell---in English and German are capable of signifying an evidential meaning in addition to the general sense of perception, i.e. they encode the speaker's evidence for the proposition. The type of evidence can be either direct (as in first-hand perception) or indirect (as in hearsay or inference). There is virtually no literature examining the evidential use of perception verbs in English and German, and hence we know very little about how perception shaping our epistemology is linguistically expressed in Germanic. My corpus-based study of perception verbs in English and German from the Early Modern Period to the Present reveals that not only is the high degree of polysemy expressed by some perception verbs evinced in the evidential domain as well, but also that certain evidential meanings are hound to certain complementation patterns/construction types of the perception verbs.