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Abstract The paper presents a diachronically based concept of the evidential function in the language. It is argued for a specific discourse evidentiality of the oldest autochthonic German poetry which encoded not epistemic interpretations of outer sources of information, but rather a strong guarantee for the truth of reported events. The origins of this kind of evidentiality can be found both in ontogenesis of a given language, e. g. language acquisition, and in its phylogenesis.
Michaił L. Kotin (Thu,) studied this question.