Semantics of evidentials: German reportative modals

German features a variety of evidential strategies, i.e. ways to express the speaker’s type of source of information for a proposition. The evidential (reportative) uses of the German modal verbs sollen ‘should’ and wollen ‘want’ are typically given a purely modal analysis that yields correct predictions for unembedded cases, but fails to account for many embedded occurrences. Based on a corpus and a questionnaire study it is argued that these modals can receive three distinct kinds of interpretation when they occur embedded in clausal complements (partly dependent on the embedding predicate). A revised analysis of reportative sollen is offered that involves a reportative presupposition and a conditionally activated assertive component. Finally, sollen is compared to other reportative strategies in German, especially the reportative subjunctive, and the effects of having multiple evidentials in a single clause are pointed out (evidential concord).