Alte und neue Fragen der Modalpartikel-Forschung

This article offers an overview of new pieces of work concerned with modal particles (mp) in German. As the amount of literature on this topic is abundant, it is even more important to look at the subject from a certain distance now and then. On the one hand, the paper addresses two questions that have in fact been of interest since linguists started studying these entities, but which still lie at the core of investigation into the wordsʼ interpretation and their linearization properties: 1) How abstract and concrete does the modelling of mps have to be? 2) Where exactly are mps positioned within the middle field of the German clause? On the other hand, this paper discusses three topics that have been studied rather recently: the interaction of mps and discourse structure, the treatment of mps as expressives and the occurrence of mps in embedded environments.