This book delivers the first comprehensive study on German modal verbs which summarises and critically reflects the discussion of the last 500 years, checks these findings against large corpus data and is accessible to the English reader. It is shown that non-epistemic modal verbs modify events, whereas their epistemic counterparts modify the proposition, and how the latter developed from the former.

• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Modal verbs: A class struggle
• 3. The nature of epistemic modality
• 4. Twenty-one commandments for epistemic modality
• 5. Reportative and evidential modal operators
• 6. Anchoring the deictic centre
• 7. On black magic: A diachronic explanation
• 8. Summary
• Primary sources
• References
• Author index
• Subject index