wollen: On the verge between quotative and reportive evidential

Abstract This paper investigates certain uses of the German modal verb wollen ‘will, want’ (dubbed WILL) in which it relates non-firsthand information to a source, a function comparable to that of both reportive evidentiality and reported speech. The latter distinction is reframed in terms of a reportive-quotative opposition, and based on corpus-driven analysis the paper argues that WILL displays a combination of traits that warrant it the composite label “quoportive”. It is concluded that WILL, in its hybridity, is evidence for the existence of a category called “referral” which captures what is shared between evidentiality and reported speech.