Chapter 9

Three German discourse particles as speech act modifiers

This work attempts to reduce the properties of three German discourse particles (DPs), ja, nicht and etwa, to the basic building blocks of a formal discourse model (Farkas & Bruce 2010). We propose a definition of DPs as speech act modifiers that restricts the space of allowed variation of their meanings, arguing against previous approaches in terms of speaker attitudes. Speech acts modified by ja update the Common Ground (CG) directly; previous characterizations of the epistemic status of the proposition arise as descriptions of common justifications for such an imposed CG update. Etwa and nicht turn open polar questions with two default resolutions into questions with only one unmarked resolution; epistemic or bouletic attitudes arise as frequent connotations.