Linguistische Berichte Heft 254

In the first part of the paper I discuss the popular view that main clause phenomena are licensed by underlying illocutionary elements, e.g. by Force heads. I will point out several empirical and theoretical problems of this view. An alternative approach is outlined in the following sections. For embeddable main clause phenomena, all more general restrictions on their occurrence in embedded clauses of German will be shown to follow from three semantic/ pragmatic conditions on their possible contexts. These conditions are rooted in the nature of the phenomena as elements that express specific speaker attitudes. As for unembeddable main clause phenomena, I will try to show that, in typical cases, they reflect the nonembeddability of sentence-mood constructions. This approach will be argued to solve or avoid the problems of theories based on illocutionary licensors and to be both more economical and more explanatory than these theories. It also offers an account of the close connection between main clause phenomena and illocutions.

This paper is about the German modal particels ja, JA and denn. These particles occur in main clauses, complement clauses and adverbial clauses. I will argue that they are not dependent on sentence type or illocutionary force; instead, they interact with specific attitudes that are part of the extra-propositional meaning of a sentence. ja is licensed by an attitude of belief, JA by an attitude of volition and denn by an attitude of quest for knowledge. The modal particles add particular content to these attitudes. The important aspect is that this interaction works in the same way for main clauses and embedded clauses (Section 1). Section 2 deals with the question of whether the occurrence and the interpretation of modal particles are detemined by syntactic principles. It will first be shown that the assumption of a specific syntactic projection (ForceP) licensing modal particles leads to several internal contradictions and should therefore be abandoned (2.1). Second, the anchoring of modal particles is not determined by syntax; instead, any suitable attitude can be the anchoring point of the particle (2.2.). In summary, this paper is a plea for a non-syntactic, purely semantic treatment of modal particles.

The present contribution concerns three types of the German negation nicht, the normal sentential negation, the constituent negation and, in particular, the so-called expletive negation in temporal adverbial clauses. There will be considered the morphosyntactic properties of nicht and its licensing and semantic interpretation. It is argued that the expletive negation is expectative in nature and exhibits selectional restrictions to its context, which have to do with prospectivity. This will be shown in the analysis of some temporal connectives

Dorian Roehrs & Christopher Sapp (2016): Quantifying expressions in the history of German syntactic reanalysis and morphological change. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing.