Chapter 7

Is the information-structural contribution of modal particles in the syntax, in discourse structure, or in both?

Traditionally, information structure belongs to sentence structure, whereas discourse particles operate at the level of discourse structure (Hansen 1998a). Modal particles, by contrast, belong to sentence structure, too. They are also widely recognized as making a significant contribution to information structure. At the same time, a distinction between modal particles and discourse particles on semantic or otherwise functional grounds is notoriously difficult and controversial (Hansen 1998a; Waltereit & Detges 2007). Recently, Ozerov (2015) has suggested that at least some of what is traditionally thought of as information structure need not, in fact, be encoded at the level of sentence grammar, but may be more appropriately regarded as reflecting discourse-structuring techniques. A re-examination of modal particles would seem to be well-suited to make a contribution to this debate, since it has long been recognized that modal particles are sensitive to syntactic constraints (such as position and sentence type) while having a discourse-related function. In this paper, I will look at the French modal particle quand même (Waltereit 2004). This particle, originally a concessive adverb meaning, roughly, ‘nevertheless’, has come to develop, from the end of the 19th century, two modal particle uses which can perhaps be approximately described by the meaning ‘anyway’ with a forward-looking and a backward-looking nuance, respectively, alongside further discourse-level differences. This shows that modal particles may encode, alongside sentence-level information structure, also discourse-level information structure.