The article argues that Modal Particles (MPs) in German constitute low, intrasentential, C‐related elements: rather than being adverbs, MPs constitute a class of emergent functional heads that spell out sentence type features. This categorisation explains many of the hitherto miraculous properties of MPs. Alternative analyses assume that MPs are adverbs, and line up in the specifier positions of a functional cascade that constitutes a clause in ‘cartographic’ approaches to syntactic modelling. These analyses fail to describe the properties of MPs and adverbs in German, I claim. The emergence of MPs follows a general trend in the development of German to express grammatical properties periphrastically.

Much current theorizing analyzes ellipsis as a PF operation silencing designated syntactic domains from which focal constituents are extracted prior to deletion. 1 In many cases, this requires exceptional evacuation movements that are not observed—and often altogether illicit—in corresponding nonelliptical forms. We introduce a novel set of data involving modal particles in German that militates strongly against obligatory movement of ellipsis remnants, suggesting that deletion instead applies to independently generated surface forms, in a manner analogous to deaccenting. The discussion will focus on clausal ellipsis only, ignoring other, crosslinguistically less common types of incompleteness such as VP-ellipsis and pseudogapping.

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This article argues against cascades of information-structural functional heads in the German middle field as an explanation for scrambling movements. Instead, we argue, some instances of scrambling correlate with sentence-level semantic effects, whereas other word order changes are affected by prosody and do not have any interpretative effects. An alternative architecture for scrambling is developed, which takes into account the clear empirical differences between these different subtypes of what is summarily called 'scrambling'. In this architecture, syntax underspecifies word order and is ignorant of information structure. The apparent interaction of word order, semantic interpretations and discourse is explained by an interface architecture that licenses word orders on the basis of their syntactic, semantic and prosodic (but not information structural) properties.

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