Information-Structural Perspectives on Discourse Particles: Introduction to the volume

Pierre-Yves Modicom (1, 2) , Olivier Duplâtre

1 Laboratoire Cogitamus
2 CLARE - Cultures, Littératures, Arts, Représentations, Esthétiques

What can information-structural categories tell us about discourse particles? This volume is concerned with the various interactions between Information Structure and the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of those particles that take scope over the whole utterance or even beyond, and mark phenomena such as stance, speech act specification, Common Ground Management or discourse structuration (Fernandez-Vest 1994). For clarity’s stake, all these particles will be labelled ‘discourse particles”. Several subtypes ought to be distinguished depending on the scope or on the precise function of these particles. Especially, modal particles tend to emerge as a special subgroup within the set of discourse particles or even discourse markers (for discussion, see Waltereit & Detges 2007 and the studies collected in Degand et al. 2013 or Fedriani & Sansò 2017). As we shall see in the course of this volume, information-structural categories might actually be relevant tools to assess the relevance of such a distinction. But for now, we shall use ‘discourse particles’ as cover term for modal particles as they are known from Germanic, sentential particles like Japanese sentence-final particles, and other illocutionary particles that might interact with Information Structure. (...)

Domaines: Linguistique

Pierre-Yves Modicom, Olivier Duplâtre. Information-Structural Perspectives on Discourse Particles: Introduction to the volume. Information-Structural Perspectives on Discourse Particles, pp.2-24, 2020, ⟨10.1075/slcs.213.int⟩. ⟨halshs-03293988⟩