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Part of
Particles in German, English, and Beyond
Edited by Remus Gergel, Ingo Reich and Augustin Speyer
[Studies in Language Companion Series 224] 2022
► pp. 25–68

Chapter 2
From up-toning intensifying particle to scalar focus particle

A new developmental path

| University of Tübingen

The paper proposes a new developmental path from up-toning intensifying particle to additive scalar focus particle based on a diachronic corpus analysis of the German focus particles zumal ‘especially’, gar ‘even’, and sogar ‘even’. The meaning shift took place about 1600 and was facilitated by shared morpho-syntactic and semantic properties of the source and target meanings. Critical (ambiguous) and isolating contexts play a crucial role in the study. The data indicate the occurrence of two types of critical contexts, a syntactically motivated one and a semantically motivated one. Furthermore, the new developmental path is argued to follow a general cross-linguistic tendency of additive scalar focus particles to develop from scalar expressions in a broader sense.

Keywords: diachrony, intensifying particle, focus particle, German, critical contexts, isolating contexts, degree semantics, scalarity, gradability
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Stages of meaning change
  • 3.The developmental path up-toning intensifying particle > additive scalar focus particle
    • 3.1Structural properties of intensifying and focus particles
    • 3.2Semantic closeness of intensifying and scalar focus particles
    • 3.3Summary
  • 4.The development of zumal, gar, and sogar in German
    • 4.1The particle zumal ‘especially’
    • 4.2The particle gar ‘even’
    • 4.3The particle sogar ‘even’
  • 5.Scalarity as a source of focus particle meaning
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Corpora
  • References
Published online: 16 August 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.224.02ebe
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