Discourse Particles, Discourse Relations and Information Structure: The Case of Nämlich

Abstract

The paper presents an analysis of the meaning and discourse effects of the German discourse particle nämlich that unifies its different readings and explains its distributional properties. I suggest that nämlich is most adequately analysed in terms of it indicating a specificational relation between its host and the preceding sentence, which in a question-based framework can be implemented as indicating an answer to a "specifying question", a discourse question requiring an answer that provides a more detailed description of some aspect of the preceding utterance. The analysis represents a refinement and extension of the question-based analysis of nämlich developed in Onea and Volodina (2009) where nämlich is analysed in terms of indicating that its host is a short answer to an implicit constituent question or a Why-discourse question. The approach I provide suggests solutions to several puzzles related to the distributional properties of nämlich.