Böcker av Björn Wiemer

This volume assembles contributions addressing clausal complementation across the entire South Slavic territory. The main focus is on particular aspects of complementation, covering the contemporary standard languages as well as older stages and/or non-standard varieties and the impact of language contact, primarily with non-Slavic languages. Presenting in-depth studies, they thus contribute to the overarching collective aim of arriving at a comprehensive picture of the patterns of clausal complementation on which South Slavic languages profile against a wider typological background, but also diverge internally if we look closer at details in the contemporary stage and in diachronic development. The volume divides into an introduction setting the stage for the single case-studies, an article developing a general template of complementation with a detailed overview of the components relevant for South Slavic, studies addressing particular structural phenomena from different theoretical viewpoints, and articles focusing on variation in space and/or time.

Evidentiality deals with the marking of information source, that is with means that specify how we come to know what we (think to) know. For instance, such means indicate whether knowledge derives from hearsay, or whether an inference has been based on perception or on knowledge about habits. Often these indications are vague. This book focuses on sentence adverbs and so-called function words in Slavic languages. Six of them were subject of a questionnaire survey, whose discussion, preceded by general methodological background, occupies the second part of this book. The first half contains a thorough consideration of notional links between evidentiality and related domains, first of all of epistemic modality, and it discusses the intricacies of doing lexicography of evidential marking.