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Historical Linguistics 2022: Selected papers from the 25th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Oxford, 1–5 August 2022
Edited by Holly Kennard, Emily Lindsay-Smith, Aditi Lahiri and Martin Maiden
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 369] 2025
► pp. 233–249

Grammaticalization of sentence adverbs and modal particles revisited

| University of Tübingen
| University of Göttingen
| University of Tübingen
| University of Göttingen
This paper investigates the development of sentence adverbs (SAdvs) and modal particles (MPs) by especially focusing on the German language. By exploring their common grammaticalization paths, we claim that these are much more restricted than previously assumed. In particular, we argue that two pathways seem to play a major — if not exclusive — role, namely one starting from lower adverbs and one from parenthetical clauses, and that syntactic ambiguity in the middle field plays a fundamental role in this process. In addition, we show that there is no evidence of secondary grammaticalization occurring within the class of sentence adverbs and modal particles.
Keywords: grammaticalization, sentence adverb, modal particle, parenthetical, reanalysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Two major paths
    • 2.1Path I: Lower event-related adverbials > SAdvs/MPs
    • 2.2Path II: Clausal parentheticals > SAdvs/MPs
  • 3.Syntactic ambiguity and reanalysis in the middle field
  • 4.Secondary grammaticalization?
    • 4.1From strong to weak SAdv?
    • 4.2Syntactic climbing within higher adverbial domains?
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Corpora
  • References
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
References (49)
Corpora
DeReKo = Deutsches Referenzkorpus / Archiv der Korpora geschriebener Gegenwartssprache. Mannheim: Institut für Deutsche Sprache. [URL]
DGD = Datenbank für Gesprochenes Deutsch. Mannheim: Institut für Deutsche Sprache. [URL]
DTA = Digitaler Teil des Deutschen Textarchivs. Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften Deutsches Textarchiv. [URL]
MWB = Mittelhochdeutsches Wörterbuch. [URL]
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