Michel Lefèvre

Bewertungspartikeln als kommunikative Funktionsklasse

Thirty years ago, French linguists of the German language defined several functional classes of communicative words. One of these classes contains »appreciative particles«: these are communicative words such as leider or glücklicherweise, by which speakers can express a subjective, positive or negative opinion about the proposition they are enouncing. These appreciative particles were adverbs in former centuries. They often evolved into communicative words during the 18th century, such as glücklicherweise: the functional change of this morphem can be observed between 1730 and 1760. In contemporary language, many of these particles end with the affix -weise. Often the status of this kind of word remains ambiguous in modern German, part adverb, part communicative particle, which is evidence of linguistic evolution still in progress.