54
Old English Hwæt
not personally witnessed by the speaker, but rather told to him or her by others
or part of general knowledge.
While hwæt in its discourse function often has “evidential implications”
(Anderson 1986 : 305), I do not believe that it is in fact an evidential. First,
hwæt does not have evidential meaning as its “primary meaning,” as Anderson
( 1986 : 274) argues must be the case for a form to be an evidential. As was
shown above, for you know (and hence hwæt ), the interactive function is cen-
tral, with reference to the hearer’s knowledge often being a pose or a pre-
tense. Second, the etymological source of hwæt does not correspond to any of
the sources identifi ed by Anderson ( 1986 : 275) or Willett ( 1988 : 61), that is,
perfects, verbs of perception, verbs of speaking, or expressions of modality;
Anderson warns, in fact, that a restricted defi nition of evidential is necessary to
exclude forms “which have little in common with typical evidentials, either in
their function or in their etymological origins” (305). Third, while evidentials
are speaker- focused in that they refer to the speaker’s sources of knowledge
(e.g., I guess , I think ), hwæt is hearer- focused, referring only secondarily to the
speaker’s knowledge in the sense ‘I know that you know.’ Examples (4) and
(5) above show particularly clearly the hearer- directed nature of hwæt ; the
form occurs here with clauses containing second- person pronouns and voca-
tives, which remind the hearer of what he or she knows. Other examples like-
wise show this focus on the hearer’s knowledge, often again explicitly marked
with second- person and vocative forms: In (3a) the audience is reminded of
what it has been told, and in (6), the addressee is reminded of what he or she
has evidence of or can see.
Although hwæt does not itself appear to be an evidential, it does frequently
precede a clause containing an evidential or an evidential- like form that indi-
cates how the knowledge was acquired. Often the knowledge is acquired in
what Willett ( 1988 : 57) terms an indirect fashion, via second- hand report,
hearsay, or folklore or via what Anderson ( 1986 : 289) terms hearsay (general
reputation, myth or history, quotative, hearsay proper). That is, the clause fol-
lowing hwæt may indicate with verbs such as (ge)hieran (1b, 1c, 2a, 3b, 8a),
frigan/ frignan (1a, 4b),^14 leornian (2b), sprecan (4a), or nægan wordum (4b)
that the speaker’s knowledge is acquired through language; the clause may
also indicate, but here without explicit marking, that the knowledge is acquired
through nonpersonal experience of the past (7a– b) or that it is a part of gen-
eral knowledge (8a– b) or is self- evident (6). Less often, it indicates that the
information was acquired directly through personal external (1e, 1f) or internal
experience, i.e., a dream (1d), or through personal experience of the past (7c).
14 In fact, Bammesberger ( 2006 : 5) notes that the preterite of (ge)frignan often “has practically
presential meaning and can be rendered by ‘know’ in the present,” noting that gefrunon in the
opening lines of Beowulf would be translated “we know.”