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… read more
All German modal particles share important common properties. However, in a diachronic perspective, their origin has often been explained by assuming that they have grammaticalized from different types of lexemes belonging to several word classes: adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, etc. The present… read more
This paper aims to investigate the so-called gehen+infinitive construction in German, in which an inflected form of the (movement) verb gehen ‘go’ is combined with the infinitive of another main verb and, thus, seems to behave like an auxiliary syntactically. Supported by two questionnaire… read more
In the following paper, we deal with the properties of the definite article in German. Starting from the existing literature on Present-day German, we show that, in combination with prepositions, two forms of the definite article may be used, namely a full one and a reduced one. They are used in… read more
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… read more