Epistemicity has gained renewed interest in recent years in linguistics. However, there is little consensus on its definition (Riccioni et al. 2013). Some scholars have defined it as speaker’s judgment of the likelihood of the information conveyed (Cappelli 2007, Corniellie 2007), others as  the speaker’s attitude regarding the reliability of the propositions (Dengale and Tasmow 2001, Gonzalez 2005), and others as the commitment and involvement of the speakers to the truthfulness of the statements (Sanders and Spooren 1996, De Haan 1999).

In this paper, I view epistemicity as the realization of the speaker’s commitment and attitude regarding the truthfulness of the statements, and I focus on its lexical realization in Old High German. Although the number of studies on epistemicity on modern languages is steadily growing, scholarship on epistemicity from a historical perspective using corpus linguistics is still missing. This study attempts to bridge this gap in the literature.  The present study examines the combinations of personal, temporal, and local deixis in in the Old High German Gospel Book (between 863 and 871) by Otfrid von Weißenburg, Some examples are reported in (1) and (2),

 

         (1)     So wír nu        hiar  bigúnnun

                     So we now here began-1pl.past

                    “So now here we have begun”

                     (Evangelienbuch, Ludw.114)

 

         (2)    Tház ih hier   nu   zéllu               thaz       weiz    thiu wórolt ellu,

                    That  I  here  now tell-1sg.pres   so that  knows the  world  all

                    “I tell it so that the whole world know”

                     (Evangelienbuch, 3. 6.1)

 

The example in (1) is taken from the opening chapter of the gospel harmony, in which the author solemnly states the primary purpose of his writing to the reader. The example in (2) is taken from the chapter narrating the multiplication of bread. In these examples, the personal pronouns ih (I) and wír (we) are combined with the local adverb hier/hiar (here) and the temporal adverb nu (now). On one hand, these lines draw the attention of the reader to these passages. On the other hand, I argue, they reflect the commitment of the author to these statements. These lines are introducing events relevant not only to the narration, but also to the author and the audience. A frequency analysis of the instances of these combinations reveals that Otfrid used them forty times in total throughout the poem, and half of the instances alone contains the first-person singular pronoun ih in the nominative case. These findings suggest that, although the use of these combinations was probably partially influenced by the necessity to fill out the unstressed syllables in the lines, as dictated by the Germanic meter, the frequency and content of these combinations could be seen as the lexical realization of the commitment and attitude of the writer to his statements.

In conclusion, this paper provides evidence for earliest realizations of epistemicity viewed as the lexical realization of the attitude of the speaker regarding the commitment and the truthfulness of the statements. More broadly speaking, the present study offers a deeper understanding of epistemicity from a historical linguistic perspective.