Blijken: een evidentieel-miratieve outsider

Abstract

Dutch has three seem-type verbs (schijnen, lijken, blijken), which behave in clearly different ways, although they can all be regarded as epistemicevidential markers in some of their uses. This paper addresses the semantic contribution of blijken, its morpho-syntactic variability and the possible link between both. The analysis is based on data taken from the Corpus of Spoken Dutch (CGN). One of the main findings of this paper pertains to the fact that blijken not only has (typically intersubjective) epistemic-evidential meaning, but also expresses mirativity, especially in those constructional patterns in which the qualification expressed by the verb is non-focal (and hence has only secondary information status). The corpus data show that such non-focal uses of blijken can occur in every construction type the verb occurs in, but clearly favour inherently non-focalizing syntactic patterns like the auxiliary use of blijken with a te-infinitive.