Particles: Presupposition Triggers, Context Markers or Speech Act Markers

Between Specification and Explanation: About a German Discourse Particle

“…The semantic difference between und zwar and nämlich, hence, boils down to the difference between a presupposition trigger and a context marker in the sense of Zeevat (2003). This result seems natural, since most discourse particles in the narrower sense specified in section 1 are in fact context markers, i.e.…”

“…In a narrower sense, the term discourse particle only refers to those particles that relate an utterance to the discourse context. Often, the meaning of discourse particles can be spelled out as a presupposition, but not all discourse particles allow the accommodation of their presuppositions: some (context markers in the sense of Zeevat 2003) cannot be accommodated while others, such as only in the analy-sis of Beaver and Clark (2008), can. Specificational particles come in both classes: nämlich mainly differs from und zwar in the non-availability of accommodation for its presupposition.…”

“…It concerns expressive meaning (Kratzer, 1999), presuppositions and context marking (Zeevat, 2002(Zeevat, , 2003 or conventional implicatures (Potts, 2005), all also known as projective meaning. Discourse particles often encode information about the context in which a particular utterance or expression must be interpreted or information about epistemic or emotional states of the speaker with regard to some particular proposition.…”

Lexical choice of modal expressions

“…Furthermore, the particles are typically used with an epistemic conversational background. Zeevat (2004) points out that particles function as context-and speech act markers. As context markers, they signal the existence of a specific relation between the common ground CG and proposition φ.…”

“…Pragmatic constraints Our formulation of pragmatic constraints is based on Zeevat's (2003Zeevat's ( , 2004) work on speech act marking. Basically, Zeevat describes speech act markers (focus markers, modal particles, and others) as planning operators with preconditions and effects.…”