TY - THES ID - 136934305 TI - The role of the experiencer in Dutch evidential verbs lijken, blijken and schijnen AU - Gijsen, Michelle. AU - Davidse, Kristin AU - KU Leuven. Faculteit Letteren. Opleiding Master of Advanced Studies in Linguistics (Leuven et al) PY - 2016 PB - Leuven KU Leuven. Faculteit Letteren DB - UniCat UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:136934305 AB - This thesis discusses the effect of the presence of an experiencer in Dutch evidential constructions with the semi-auxiliaries lijken (‘to seem’), blijken (‘to appear, to turn out’) and schijnen (‘to seem, to appear’). The thesis provides a corpus-based analysis based on data from the Corpus Gesproken Nederlands and the Twente Newspaper Corpus. The analysis focusses on three dimensions of the evidential constructions: construction type, the kind of evidence the speaker has for making the utterance, and subjectivity. I define intersubjectivity and subjectivity respectively as the shared or non-shared status of information. I look at subjectivity on different levels, namely the (non-)shared status of the source, the people involved in performing the evidential claim, and who is committed to the proposition. The analysis shows that the presence of an experiencer has an effect on all three dimensions. First, experiencers can occur in a variety of construction types with each verb, but they are only really frequent in copula constructions. Second, the presence of an experiencer nearly always points to inferential evidence. Further, experiencers also often occur with non-evidential meanings indicating opinions and impressions. Third, the presence of an experiencer points to subjectivity, on all levels: the experiencer is the only one who has access to the source, he is the only one who performs the evidential claim, and he is the only one who is committed to the proposition. The only exceptions are with second-person experiencers in questions, and some third-person experiencers in which the evidential is not used performatively, but descriptively. ER -