This article offers an overview of new pieces of work concerned with modal particles (mp) in German. As the amount of literature on this topic is abundant, it is even more important to look at the subject from a certain distance now and then. On the one hand, the paper addresses two questions that have in fact been of interest since linguists started studying these entities, but which still lie at the core of investigation into the wordsʼ interpretation and their linearization properties: 1) How abstract and concrete does the modelling of mps have to be? 2) Where exactly are mps positioned within the middle field of the German clause? On the other hand, this paper discusses three topics that have been studied rather recently: the interaction of mps and discourse structure, the treatment of mps as expressives and the occurrence of mps in embedded environments.

Most research that has been done on the German modal particle eben seems to agree that the primary function of this particle is to mark the contents of an utterance as unalterable or obvious and as derivable from the context of the interaction. However, this function has in most cases been described on the basis of examples in standard German and possible dialectal variation has hardly ever been taken into consideration. By analysing several examples of written Swiss German, this paper describes a dialectal use of the modal particle eben which differs from the one that has been prevalent in previous research. Eben here seems not to express unalterability or derivability. Instead, it signals that an utterance contains information which is needed to clarify or give reasons for something that has previously been uttered. Furthermore, it is argued that the Swiss German modal particle drum/drom has a function very similar to the one of eben, whereas halt, which is mostly synonymous to eben in standard German, cannot be used this way.

German deverbal nominalizations in -ung denote a broad variety of sortal types, including events, result states and different kinds of objects, thus being a typical instance of systematic polysemy, or more precisely an instance of Nunberg’s (1995) ‘dense metonymy’. Brandtner & von Heusinger (2010) argue that these nominalizations do not have a complex lexical representation such as Pustejowsky’s dot objects, but rather an underspecified representation that is specified in the compositional process, pointing out the unacceptability of copredications involving predicates with different selectional restrictions. However, there are such constructions that are acceptable, counter to their predictions. To account for these they apply a second, coercion operation, namely Nunberg’s (1995) pragmatic process of predicate transfer; they thus explain copredication of nominalizations by two different processes: the first predicate semantically restricts the nominalization to one particular type, while the second predicate is subject to predicate transfer, such that it then can be applied to the determined type of the nominalization. According to Nunberg, this predicate transfer process is restricted by two pragmatic conditions: (i) there must be a salient functional relation between the original and the shifted meaning, and (ii) there must be ‘noteworthy’ information expressed by the sentence. In this paper we investigate Brandtner & von Heusinger’s account and the predictions made by Nunberg experimentally by testing the acceptability of reading shifts using judgement experiments, carefully controlling for contextual and lexical variables. The results reveal that the effect of the salience and noteworthiness conditions, which we reformulate as one single condition on relatedness, is psychologically real and accounts for the contrasts in readings in Nunberg’s specific examples. However, the results also show that the effect is not specific to the reading shift environments, but is rather a background coherence effect of priming or plausibility. The analysis as predicate transfer would thus corroborate the claim that there is complex representation for nominalization, but rather an incremental specification process.

Karsten Rinas über: Meinunger, André (2014): Sick of Sick? Berlin: Kadmos.

Dennis Wegner über Carlo Cecchetto & Caterina Donati (2015): (Re)labeling.

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