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.

An evidential perfect in Wangerooge Frisian

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