Modal- oder Abtönungspartikeln? Zur pragmatischen Wende in der deutschsprachigen Partikelforschung

• Authors: Urszula Topczewska , Michał Fijałkiewicz

Title variants

EN

Modal or downtoning particles? On the pragmatic turn in German-language particle research

• Languages of publication: DE

Abstracts

EN

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.

Keywords

EN

history of particle research; pragmatic turn; German particles; downtoning particles; modal particles; particles as illocutionary indicators; multimodal particle research

Discipline

• PHILOLOGY_&_LINGUISTICS: PHILOLOGY & LINGUISTICS

• Publisher: Institute of the Czech Language, Czech Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Slovo a slovesnost: časopis pro otázky teorie a kultury jazyka (Slovo a slovesnost: A journal for the theory of language and language cultivation)
• Year: 2025
• Volume: 86
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 236-262
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Urszula Topczewska

• Slovo a slovesnost, redakce, Ústav pro jazyk český AV ČR, v.v.i., Letenská 4, 118 51 Praha 1, Czech Republic

author

Michał Fijałkiewicz

• Slovo a slovesnost, redakce, Ústav pro jazyk český AV ČR, v.v.i., Letenská 4, 118 51 Praha 1, Czech Republic