Modal- oder Abtönungspartikeln? Zur pragmatischen Wende in der deutschsprachigen Partikelforschung
Modal or downtoning particles? On the pragmatic turn in German-language particle research

Summary/Abstract: In Germanic particle research, there is no consensus as to which term best captures the polyfunctionality of those particles that mark the speaker’s attitude towards their statement. In the history of particle research, there have been several terminological proposals to capture the contribution of these expressions to sentence meaning, e.g., ‘modal particles’, ‘downtoning particles’, ‘illocutionary particles’, or ‘discourse particles’. This paper examines the extent to which the pragmatic turn in linguistics has influenced terminological preferences. Against the background of the history of research dating back to antiquity, it is demonstrated that these preferences are related, among other things, to whether the units concerned are merely ascribed a context-dependent function, that is, to modify the sentence proposition, or whether they are regarded as a separate logical-grammatical category.

• Details
• Contents