Deutsches auch und italienisches anche im Vergleich

Abstract

The focus of our contribution is the German particle auch ‘also’ and its Italian counterpart anche. From a semantic point of view, auch and anche convey the same additive meaning in both languages: through them an element, called ‘domain of association’, is added to a list of further elements for which the auch/anche phrase applies. From a syntactical point of view, auch and anche can occupy different positions in the sentence by modifying the type and the scope of the domain of association. This results in four basic usage patterns which are similar in both languages and correspond to just as many functions of auch/anche: (i) additivity, (ii) sentence connection, (iii) focus domain, and (iv) modality. Despite these common functions, auch and anche interact with the syntax and the information structure of the sentence in German and in Italian differently. Furthermore, they are used in conversation contexts, which are distinctive in both languages.
 By starting from the current description of auch and anche in the literature, the first aim of our contribution is to provide evidence for the above-mentioned four basic functions despite their language-specific usage contexts. As a second aim, we want to validate our systematization through the analysis of spoken data for German and Italian, explaining why some functions are more likely to be found in the former than in the latter.

The Syntax–Pragmatics Interface in Heritage Languages: The Use of anche (“Also”) in German Heritage Speakers of Italian

“…( 6) and ex. ( 7), and Moroni and Bidese 2021a;Reimer and Dimroth 2021, a.o.). By contrast, anche in the utterances produced by the IHSs of our corpus never bears the focus accent.…”

“…This is typical of multifunctional particles in standard (non-heritage) varieties (cf. Moroni and Bidese 2021a;Reimer and Dimroth 2021, p. 6). In the following sequence, anche could be interpreted either as an additive particle or as a modal particle: 58a.…”

“…Recent studies (Bidese et al 2019;Moroni and Bidese 2021a;Cognola et al 2022) show that Italian anche and German auch display the same functions but behave to some extent differently with respect to their syntactic, prosodic, and pragmatic properties. In this section, we describe the three functions of anche and auch in the two languages and highlight the asymmetries in their realizations.…”