Evidentiality the linguistic encoding of a speaker's or writer's evidence for an asserted
proposition has begun to receive serious attention from linguists only in the last quarter
century. Much of this attention has focused on languages that encode evidentiality in the
grammar while much less interest has been shown in languages that express evidentiality
through means other than inflectional morphology. In English and German for instance the
verbs of perception - those verbs denoting sight sound touch smell and taste - are prime
carriers of evidential meaning. This study surveys the most prominent of the perception verbs
in English and German across all five sensory modalities and accounts for the range of
evidential meanings by examining the general polysemy found among perception verbs as well as
the specific complementation patterns in which these verbs occur.
