Perceptive evidential wie-clauses in German: a situation-based account

The chapter is concerned with investigating the formal properties and the semantic interpretation of non-manner wie-clauses in German. The properties of these clauses, analysed as perceptive evidential relatives, will be compared to pseudo-relatives in Italian and a common analysis of them is proposed. The core insight of the proposal is that perceptive evidential wie-clauses in German and Italian are depictive relatives that not only express an aspectual relation between the matrix event and the embedded event but indicate that the matrix subject has direct (perceptual) evidence for the described event by way of witnessing (or having witnessed) a concrete scene of the embedded event. The crucial ingredient of this account is the role that the reference situation (introduced by Tense) plays in referring to the witnessed scene.