Passives and evidentiality: Danish reportive passives and their equivalents in German

Abstract

In Danish, passivized utterance and cognition verbs allow a particular construction where the subject of the passive verb is the semantic subject of the embedded predicate: præsidenten formodes at være flygtet (‘the president is assumed to have flown’). This use of utterance and cognition verbs with a “raised” subject can be seen as an evidentiality strategy since the embedded proposition is attributed to a source external to the speaker (hearsay), hence...