Josef Bayer

The status quo of research on discourse particles in syntax and semantics

What are discourse particles (DiPs), also known as modal particles (German Modalpartikeln) or downtoners (German Abtönungspartikeln)? Morphosyntactically, they are simply non-inflecting parts of speech. In this sense, they pattern with prepositions, complementizers, adverbs, focus particles and various other categories. However, DiPs are noticeably different from most of those elements: They show some similarities with the class of higher adverbs and with the class of focus particles. Their grammar is, nevertheless, quite different, as has often been noted: DiPs depend syntactically on sentence types and/or semantically on the speech act that a sentence type represents. DiPs are, however, extra-propositional themselves, in many ways. To give an example, consider rhetorical questions. In English, the question in (1) can be interpreted as a rhetorical question: