Discourse Particles: Descriptive and theoretical investigations on the logical, syntactic and pragmatic properties of discourse particles in German: 12 (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 9027250227 ISBN 13: 9789027250223

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Co, 1991

Synopsis

This book is about particles in the narrower sense of the word as opposed to the broader meaning covering all uninflected words of a language. In the narrower meaning of the linguistic term particles can be distinguished between logical, or scalar particles and modal, or pragmatic particles. The semantic, pragmatic and syntactic properties of modal particles differ vastly from those of the scalar particles, on the one hand, and their homonymic counterparts functioning in different syntactic categories, on the other hand. The contributions to this volume offer the latest research on the semantic, pragmatic and syntactic properties of particles in the English and German language.

About this title

Synopsis

This volume deals with the theoretical, contrastive and lexicographical aspects of discourse particles, predominantly in German and English. The first section, "Scalar particles and focus making", contrasts a series of German particle lexemes with their contextually appropriate English counterparts. It attempts at a justification of different syntactic structures in questions, and of discourse and temporal aspectual particles. In the second section, "modal particles and illocutive semantics", a unified semantic description is presented, followed by a discussion as to how the category of discourse particles may have come into being in the first place. The concluding two sections deal with neurophysiological evidence for the modular character of scalar versus modal particles and with questions related to lexicographic description. The collection of papers maybe of interest to theoretical and contrastive linguists, language teachers and lexicographers.

Edition details

• Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Co
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9027250227
• ISBN 13: 9789027250223
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 346
• Editor: Abraham Werner