https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3387-4340
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ABSTRACT
This paper analyses the use of verbal tense forms in Wangerooge Frisian, a West Germanic language spoken on the Wadden Sea island Wangerooge until the early twentieth century. Specifically, the use of the present, past, and perfect constructions is investigated in a corpus of texts from the nineteenth century. It is argued that the Wangerooge Frisian perfect could be used as a non-firsthand evidential strategy marking the propositional content as hearsay or inferred. While such evidential perfects are cross-linguistically well attested, they are generally thought to be uncommon in Western European languages. The Wangerooge Frisian case thus shows the value of lesser-studied vernaculars for the typology of European languages.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Abbreviations
| 1/2/3 | = | 1st/2nd/3rd person |
| ADJZ | = | adjectivizing suffix |
| ADVZ | = | adverbializing suffix |
| COMP | = | complementizer |
| DEF | = | definite article |
| DEM | = | demonstrative |
| EXPL | = | expletive |
| F | = | feminine |
| GER | = | gerund (“long” infinitive) |
| IMP | = | imperative |
| INDF | = | indefinite article |
| INF | = | infinitive |
| M | = | masculine |
| N | = | neuter |
| OBL | = | oblique |
| PF | = | perfect |
| PL | = | plural |
| PLUPF | = | pluperfect |
| PRS | = | present |
| PST | = | past |
| PTCL | = | particle |
| PTCP | = | participle |
| SG | = | singular |
Notes
1 Note that the two finite verbs in the last sentence (is … is) are not a periphrastic tense construction, but a type of verb “echoing” or apo koinou construction also attested in other West Germanic languages (Sassen Citation1967; Huesken Citation2001; Schwitalla Citation2003, 129–130). Its distribution and function in Wangerooge Frisian remain to be investigated.
2 These evidential meanings are sometimes described under the heading of ‘epistemic modality’ (e.g., by Hansen and Heltoft Citation2011; Teleman, Hellberg, and Andersson Citation1999), though some authors (e.g., van der Auwera and Plungian Citation1998) would only consider the inferential use in (4a) to be epistemic, not the reportative one in (4b); for other views of the relation between epistemic modality and evidentiality, see, e.g., de Haan (Citation1999) or Boye (Citation2012: Ch. 1). I will not go further into this terminological question here but merely state that I consider both (4a) and (4b) to be examples of evidential strategies.
3 For other sources of evidential constructions, see the overviews in Aikhenvald (Citation2004: Ch. 9) and Friedman (Citation2018).
4 The only Scandinavian language discussed by Wiemer (Citation2010) is Swedish, but presumably because the chapter focuses on hearsay constructions, the Swedish inferential evidential perfect is not mentioned. No Scandinavian languages are included in the comparative volume by Wiemer & Marín-Arrese (Citation2022a).
5 The description of the Swedish perfect in Teleman et al. (Citation1999, 242) actually suggests that the authors consider it to have hearsay uses as well. However, no clear examples of such a use are provided.
6 The current version of Glottolog subsumes all of these under “Ems-Weser Frisian” (glottocode sate1242), for which the alternative names “East Frisian” and “Saterlandic Frisian” are given (among many others; see http://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/sate1242). This has the unfortunate implication that Wangerooge Frisian is classified as a variant (“daughter”) of Saterlandic, while in fact it was a closely related (“sister”) language or dialect.
7 What is beyond doubt is that Ehrentraut transcribed the words of his consultants very carefully. There are numerous indications of this in the material, such as assimilations, deletions (usually indicated by an apostrophe, e.g., ni’ for nich ‘not’), and occasional comments on the story by the consultant. Such meta-narrative comments were also recorded by Ehrentraut, such as when the speaker abruptly ends a fairy tale because she cannot remember the rest of it: nuu weit iik ’er nich moo fon ‘now I don’t know any more of it’ (EhV 449.220).
8 Not all of the forms in are attested in running text, but they can be inferred with certainty from Ehrentraut’s notes. The suffixes between brackets do not appear when a 1pl or 2pl subject immediately follows the finite verb (e.g., wii kriiget or kriig wii ‘we get’).
9 The other is found in FA2.16 (yaa quídert. dait sil wis passéerd wíze ‘People say: That is surely supposed to have happened’). These examples both contain the rare perfect infinitive form (fardríiviin hab ‘have exorcised’, passéerd wíze ‘have happened’) as a complement of the modal verb sil ‘shall, be supposed to’. Its function here is apparently only to express anteriority with respect to the event time. A more direct translation of the final sentence in (19) might be ‘They said that the vicar was supposed to have exorcised him at last’.
10 The exception is the last clause as won hi sliip ‘as if he was asleep’, which is in the past tense. This may be because the clause is counterfactual (cf. Section 4.1).
11 Neither Winkler (Citation1874) nor Siebs (Citation1923) states which German Bible translation the Wangerooge Frisian text was based on, but because the parish of Wangerooge was Lutheran, it was almost certainly a version of Martin Luther’s translation. I have checked three editions which would have been available in the late 1800s (Luther Citation1744, Citation1788, Citation1842), and in all three, the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15: 11–32) is narrated in the past tense.
12 I have retranscribed Siebs’ complicated phonetic transcription in the practical orthography used in EhV. See Siebs (Citation1923, 240) for the original text with German translation.:
13 The words between square brackets in (24b) were left out by Bernhardt (Citation1903), but supplied here from the context.: