DP‐Internal Modal Particles: A Case Study of German JA

Abstract

In this paper, I investigate the DP-internal occurrence of the German modal particle ja. I first demonstrate what kind of attributive configurations seem to prefer the presence of the particle ja inside the DP domain. In this context, I focus on the occurrence of particles within simple-adjective configurations and examine the roles of restrictive and so-called extreme content. I demonstrate that the DP-internal occurrence of modal particles cannot be analyzed analogous to the occurrence of modal particles in other attributive constructions such as certain types of relative clauses. Given this demonstration, I sketch a fine-grained syntactic representation of DP-internal particles, and I point out parallels to the functional makeup of CPs. (Thurmair 1989:27) (1) a. dieser ja leider viel zu fr€ uh verstorbene this JA unfortunately much too soon departed Komponist composer

German discourse particles in the second language classroom

“…Unfortunately, there is so far no study that systematically compares their frequency in informal spoken German vs. written formal registers, but intuitively we hypothesize that particles like ja and doch (see above) are highly frequent in written (formal) registers as well. On the more non-intuitive side, corpus studies have indeed shown that discourse particles are frequently used at least in informal written exchanges (Belz & Vyatkina, 2005), and also that 'exotic' uses of particles like non-sentence-level occurrences (Trotzke, 2018) can be found in written corpora of German newspapers such as the DWDS ('Digital Dictionary of the German Language') corpus (see Viesel, 2015 on such an empirical study). All in all, it is thus fair to conclude that learners of German are not only confronted with particles in colloquial and spoken registers, but also in written and more formal contexts.…”

Syntactic analyses of discourse particles through the microvariation of Basque <italic>ote</italic>

“…Apart from these positions out of the clausal spine, Bayer and Trotzke (2015), Trotzke and Turco (2015) and Trotzke (2018) have related discourse particles to smaller syntactic enviroments such as Determiner Phrases or phrases containing wh-words. Setting the construction within discourse particles found in German (Trotzke 2018) aside, the latter has been found in typologically different languages such as German, Italian and Japanese (Munaro & Poletto 2002;Bayer & Trotzke 2015;Endo 2018). Also, the Basque particle ote occurs combined to wh-words:…”