Most authors agree that modal particles – a class of function words widely considered characteristic of Modern German – cannot receive prosodic stress, though the reasons for this restriction have not yet been satisfactorily explained. This paper argues that unstressability follows from the general contribution of modal particles to compositional utterance meaning, which requires them to take scope over focus-background structures. Form and function of modal particle meanings are modelled and illustrated for five representative examples – the particles wohl, ja, eigentlich, eben and halt. It is argued that these as well as other particles, whenever they occur under prosodic stress, cannot preserve the meaning nor the syntactic behaviour of modal particles. All instances of stressed particles in German must therefore be categorized in other functional classes.

This contribution is concerned with the morphosyntax and semantics of intensional verbs like vermuten, meinen, (sich) überzeugen, überzeugt sein, related -ung-nouns like Vermutung, Meinung, Überzeugung and periphrastic constructions like die {Vermutung, Meinung, Überzeugung} haben, der {Meinung, Überzeugung} sein, with their interrelations and with the question how these expressions combine with embedded clauses. On the basis of a lexicalist theory of morphology, the relatedness of these expressions is represented in the lexicon. The embedded clauses are shown to be integrated as propositional arguments of verbs and of the corresponding eventuality nominalizations or are shifted to predicates, which can function as explicative modifiers of content nouns and of cataphoric pronouns. The paper concentrates on the interrelation between homophonous content nouns and eventuality nouns like Überzeugung and on the morphosyntax and semantics of periphrastic constructions. It will be shown that periphrastic verbs like haben, machen and geben mirror some general semantic components of the related intensional verbs and to what extent periphrastic constructions with content nouns semantically coincide with the related intensional verbs, without being incorporated syntactically. The proposed analysis will be as explicit as possible and reckons with some fundamental semantic type shifts

This paper provides an analysis of nominal root compounds in German and English in an XS (exoskeletal) neo-constructionist framework, and shows how this can account for some data that are problematic for other lexicalist and non-lexicalist (e.g. DM based) approaches to compounding. A distinction is made between two syntactic patterns of compounding in the languages investigated here, one that productively derives compositional compounds and one that derives compounds of limited or no compositionality. The derivation of the latter pattern is associated with a compound frame in an XS-model, while the former is shown to be fully derivable in syntax. Both patterns rely on simple Merge as the driving force behind the derivation of nominal root compounds. In a second step the analysis suggested for the latter type of nominal root compounds is extended to another empirical domain where non-compositionality plays a role, i.e. idioms, and it is shown that the analysis can readily account for a certain type of idiom instantiated by nominalized infinitives in German