Sonja Müller

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. mehr

This paper is concerned with combinations of modal particles (mps) in German. It is well known that such combinations are severely restricted. Constraints have been formulated that, on the one hand, concern the conditions that regulate which mps can combine at all. On the other hand, restrictions concern the question in which order the mps can combine. Focussing on the combination of ja and doch, the paper argues that the (putatively) fixed order of ja and doch is an iconic reflex in grammar. By referring to new authentic material, it argues that the order ja doch presents the unmarked order, but that linguistic contexts can be found in which the reversed (marked) order doch ja is attested. It suggests a discourse-semantic analysis which integrates the mp description by Diewald (2007) into the formal model of discourse developed in Farkas & Bruce (2010). The analysis suggested traces the difference in markedness between the two orders of ja and doch back to discourse structural requirements which have been assumed to hold in communication independently. mehr