Lice in the fur of our language? German irrelevance particles between Dutch and English

Abstract

The present paper compares the distribution of English ‑ever, German immer and/or auch, and Dutch (dan) ook in universal concessive-conditional and nonspecific free relative subordinate clauses (e.g. G. Was auch immer du willst ‘Whatever you want’) and in their elliptically reduced versions (e.g. D. … of wat dan ook ‘… or whatever’). By combining large language-specific corpora such as the DeReKo, SoNaR, and BYU corpora with the smaller multilingual Conver‑ GENTiecorpus, 38,748 instances were obtained while maintaining comparability. Whereas present-day English has only one option in both clausal and elliptical constructions, viz. WH-ever, Dutch and German show more variation: in Dutch, discontinuous W … ook is by far the most frequent option in subordinate clauses, while the complex particle dan ook is largely confined to elliptical constructions. In German subordinate clauses, immer in adjacency to the W-word is the most frequent option, thus corresponding to English WH-ever, but in elliptical constructions auch immer is predominates, thus corresponding to Dutch dan ook