Splitting up force

This paper proposes to split Rizzi’s (1997) ForceP into two distinct projections: Illocutionary Force (ILL) and Clause Type (CT). The proposal is meant to capture the cross-linguistic properties of discourse particles at the discourse level (they modify the illocutionary force by turning it into a more specific force reflecting the speaker’s intentions/attitude, Jacobs 1986, 1991), and also their syntactic restrictions. Specifically, each particle can occur in certain clause types, but not in others, and they are only licensed in clauses with ‘root properties’. In order to account for these facts, we will adopt a feature valuation mechanism along the lines of Pesetsky & Torrego (2007).