Discourse particles, clause structure, and question types

Bayer, Josef; Obenauer, Hans-Georg

doi:10.1515/tlir.2011.013

Cited by 109 publications

(100 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Unlike adverbial phrases, they cannot front to the prefield of the clause (as any other moveable phrasal constituent will in German V2 structure), and indeed fulfill all of the central empirical criteria for functional heads (cf. Bayer 2010a; Bayer & Obenauer 2011;Struckmeier 2014a). …”

Section: On the Interplay Of Syntactic Semantic And Prosodic Scrambmentioning

confidence: 99%

Against information structure heads: A relational analysis of German scrambling

Struckmeier

2017

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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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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Section: On the Interplay Of Syntactic Semantic And Prosodic Scrambmentioning

confidence: 99%

Against information structure heads: A relational analysis of German scrambling

Struckmeier

2017

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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“…Lash (: 282–5) argued that the discourse‐oriented adverbs are similar to German modal particles (Coniglio ; Bayer & Obenauer ; Bayer ). Because of their highly context sensitive nature, they are obviously not necessary in every clause.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Here, the two positions are instead called Pos1 and Pos2 because it will be shown below that at least the first position is not exclusively a subject position. Lash (2014: 282-5) argued that the discourse-oriented adverbs are similar to German modal particles (Coniglio 2006;Bayer & Obenauer 2011;Bayer 2012). Because of their highly context sensitive nature, they are obviously not necessary in every clause.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Transitivity and Subject Positions in Old Irish

Lash

2019

Trans of the Philol Soc

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This article is concerned with some fine‐grained distinctions in the syntax of subjects in Old Irish. Old Irish (7th–9th century) is typically described as a VSO language, but there are a number of sentences in the corpus in which the subject is not immediately after the subject. In this paper two case studies are conducted the results of which show that (a) non‐final late subjects are confined to non‐transitive and ‘atypical transitive’ clauses having the general form VXSY, and (b) the position of final late subjects in the schema VXS# can understood in descriptive terms as ‘right‐dislocated’ and motivated largely in information structure terms (i.e. Topic‐Comment, Focus‐Alternative), although a small residue of examples are similar to the VXSY‐type of case in being ‘atypical transitives’. The descriptive term ‘atypical transitive’ is introduced here to cover morphologically transitive clauses (with accusative marked direct objects nouns, or pronouns that can replace such nouns) that behave syntactically more like non‐transitive clauses. There are four types: negative clauses with bare indefinite objects, clauses with object‐oriented floating quantifiers, clauses in which a pronominal object serves to ‘detransitivize’ the verb, and clauses containing a verb of motion whose direct object is the goal of movement.

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“…Meibauer 1994;5 (i) vielleicht as an adverb a. Renate Coniglio 2005Coniglio , 2011Bayer and Obenauer 2011;Bayer 2012;Struckmeier 2014a;Bayer and Trotzke 2015, among others). Still, the issue has remained controversial so far.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Given that features are not categories, an X° DiP or an X° element of negation would not be an intervener. Bayer and Obenauer (2011) propose a distinction in terms of Relativized Minimality. Alternatively, it has been argued that the V2 property is actually caused by remnant vP-movement (Müller 2003).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Bayer¹,

Struckmeier²

2016

Discourse Particles

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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: (1) Who likes to be criticized? The expected answer Nobody! is already suggested by the question itself. The reason for this expectation is probably just world knowledge: Most people simply do not like to be criticized. However, there is no linguistic device in (1) which would enforce this interpretation. As a consequence, the more far-fetched interpretation as an information-seeking question is-at least technically-still possible. Compare (2): (2) Who wants to go shopping today? Here, it is not obvious at all that the question should be interpreted as a rhetorical question. It could be, technically, but such an interpretation seems to be rather far-fetched. Again, the interpretation depends on how we see the world: Since many people like to shop, the rhetorical question interpretation remains in the background.

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Discourse particles, clause structure, and question types

Cited by 109 publications

References 17 publications

Against information structure heads: A relational analysis of German scrambling

Against information structure heads: A relational analysis of German scrambling

Transitivity and Subject Positions in Old Irish

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

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