Discourse structure and syntactic embedding : the German discourse particle 'ja'

German discourse particles (DiPs) do not add truth-conditionally relevant meaning but are elements of speaker attitude and indicate a relation between the information in their scope (p) and another piece of information (q) in the context. The DiP ‘ja’ (literally ‘yes’) was claimed to be felicitous with a proposition p that the speaker believes common to both speaker and hearer, or immediately verifiable. However, formalizations modeling this into the use conditions of ‘ja’ fall short on the DiP's discourse function, which is to indicate that p is not used to address the current Question under Discussion but stands in a relation to q (pRq), where q is the information that the speaker makes another context update, pRq is intuitively explanatory, and p is not necessarily known to anyone but the speaker. Regarding prerequisite grammatical properties of the DiP's host constructions, data show that ‘ja’ is not restricted to assertive, root-like environments and defies predictions about not being able to appear in the scope of descriptive operators. Instead the data suggest that the DiP's licitness in surprising positions depends on information-structural factors.publishe

'glaubt er', 'glaub ich', 'glaub' : Integrated V1 parentheses, extraction from V2 complements, grammaticalization

In diesem Artikel werden Funktion und Struktur integrierter Verb-erst-Parenthesen wie 'glaubt sie' im Deutschen untersucht. Daten aus der geschriebenen Sprache zeigen, dass Parenthesen mit 'glauben' in erster bzw. dritter Person jeweils verschiedene syntaktische Positionen bevorzugen. Angesichts der Modalpartikel 'glaub' kann der Unterschied auf einen größeren Grammatikalisierungsgrad der Parenthesen in erster Person zurückgeführt werden. Außerdem sprechen die Daten für synchrone Variation hinsichtlich der Interpretation von Hauptsätzen mit Parenthesen vor dem finiten Verb bzw. oberflächlich identischen Vorkommen von Extraktion aus V2-Komplementen. In ihrer Funktion als epistemische oder evidentielle Adverbiale enthalten genuine Verb-erst-Parenthesen dieser Analyse zufolge keine Spuren interner Argumente oder anderer leerer Elemente

Proceedings of the Workshop : Clause Typing and the Syntax-to-Discourse Relation in Head-Final Languages

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Wer kann denn schon ja sagen?

The article explores German discourse particles (DiPs) in rhetorical whquestions (wh-RQs). While schon (roughly ‘unexpectedly’) only marks rhetorical wh-questions, denn (roughly ‘I wonder’) marks contextually arising informationseeking or rhetorical Questions under Discussion (QuDs), with or without schon. Since ja (roughly ‘unquestionably’) marks shared information, it is incompatible with questions by itself, but occasionally occurs in wh-RQs left of DiPs like schon instead of denn. The results of two acceptability judgment experiments confirm that ja is strongly dispreferred in RQs, the presence of schon improves RQs with and without ja, and denn has no effect on acceptability. A follow-up study further indicated the rhetorical reading of our target questions to prevail independently from DiPs. We conclude that ja in RQs operates on the information contributed by elements like schon, denoting roughly that the issue in question arises ‘unquestionably against expectations’. Our contexts were neutral regarding the discourse functions of ja and denn (side remarks vs. QuDs), unlike the contexts of the findings, from which we deduce that the marked ja schon-RQs, while grammatical, require specific felicity conditions. A first attempt to confirm this experimentally was globally unsuccessful and could only reveal potential hints in an exploratory analysis.publishe