of a counterfactual operator Excluded from nominalisations No verbless directional phrase complements No VP-anaphora No separation in wh-clefts May not bear sentence accent Excluded from the scope of an negation Excluded from polar questions Excluded from wh-questions Excluded from imperatives Excluded from optatives Excluded from complement clauses Excluded from event-related causal clauses Excluded from the antecedent of an event related conditional clause Excluded from temporal clauses Excluded from restrictive relative clauses Excluded from the scope of a quantifier No assent/dissent However, taking a look into languages which have a more productive inflectional morphology such as German, there is solid corpus data that epistemic modal verbs do occur in many of these environments. The only environments in which epistemic modal verbs do not occur in German are as follows. they do not occur with verbless directional phrase complements they cannot be separated from their infinitive complements in wh-clefts they do not undergo nominalisations they are exempt from adverbial infinitives they cannot be embedded under circumstantial modal verbs they cannot be embedded under predicates of desire they cannot be embedded under imperative operators they cannot be embedded under optative operators This corpus data further shows that there is no consistent class of objective epistemic modal verbs, neither in English, nor in German. Each of the assumed objective epistemic modals is acceptable in a different range of environments which are actually supposed to hold for the entire stipulated class of objective epistemic modality. The table below illustrates in which environments the most frequent epistemic modals in German, kann `can', muss `must', dürfte `be.probable', mögen `may' are attested in corpora (yes), or yield ungrammatical judgements (no). The lower part makes reference to classifications by various authors, which of these epistemic modal verb come with an objective epistemic interpretation and which are only restricted to subjective epistemic modality. Link to evidentiality Many linguists have considered possible links between epistemic modality and evidentiality, the grammatical marking of a speaker's evidence or information source. However, there is no consensus about what such a link consists of. Some work takes epistemic modality as a starting point and tries to explain evidentiality as a subtype. Others work in the other direction, attempting to reduce epistemic modality to evidentiality. Still others recognize epistemic modality and evidentiality as two fundamentally separate categories, and posit that particular lexical items may have both an epistemic and an evidential component to their meanings. However,