"The articles collected in this volume offer new perspectives into the relevance of notions such as topic, antitopic, contrastive topic, focus, verum focus and theticity for the analysis of the syntax and semantics of modal particles, sentence-final particles and other medial, sentential and illocutive particles. This book addresses three great questions in a variety of languages ranging from Japanese to Mohawk, including Basque, French, German, Italian, Kazakh, Spanish and Turkish, with some insights from English and Russian. The first question is the role played by information-structural strategies such as left dislocations, clefts or the morphological marking of focus in the rise of discourse particles. In the second part, papers are concerned with the relevance of information structure for the study of polysemic and polyfunctional discourse particles. Finally, the contribution of particles to the determination of the information-structural profile of the clause is examined, as well as their role in the information-structural specification of illocutionary types. Language-specific papers alternate with comparative approaches in order to show how newer insights on information structure can help resolve some of the classical issues of the linguistic research on particles"--.

• Information-Structural Perspectives on Discourse Particles
• Editorial page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Table of contents
• Introduction: What can information-structural categories tell us about discourse particles?
  • 1. Discourse particles and information structure: Preliminary definitions
  • 2. Information-structural aspects of the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of discourse particles
    • 2.1 Givenness and newness in the syntax and semantics of German discourse particles
    • 2.2 Common Ground Management and speech act specification as loci for information-structural strategies
    • 2.3 A cross-linguistic view: Equivalence and interactions between particles and information-structural strategies
    • 2.4 Particle placement, polyfunctionality and the role of information structure in the emergence and specialization of discourse particles
  • 3. “Epistemic authority”, “engagement” and “enimitives”: Information-structural approaches in the face of the newest typological research on particle semantics
    • 3.1 Engagement, epistemic authority, egophoricity
    • 3.2 “Enimitives”
  • 4. The contributions in this volume
  • 5. Conclusion
  • References
• Part I. The contribution of information structural strategies to the rise of discourse particles
• Chapter 1. Discourse particle position and information structure
  • 1. The position of discourse markers
  • 2. Mohawk
  • 3. Topic shift constructions
  • 4. Focus constructions
  • 5. Antitopic constructions
  • 6. Grammaticalization
  • 7. Conclusion
  • References
• Chapter 2. Information-structural properties of is that clauses
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. The semantic and pragmatic properties of is that constructions
  • 3. Predecessors of is that constructions
  • 4. Information-structural partitions
    • 4.1 Inverse copula construction
    • 4.2 Clefts and pseudo-clefts
    • 4.3 Information-structural parallelism
    • 4.4 Analysis
  • 5. Presuppositional meaning and relevance
    • 5.1 Negation: No es que
    • 5.2 Interrogative: ¿es que…?
    • 5.3 Further observations on the morpho-syntactic properties of es que
  • 6. Conclusion
  • References
• Chapter 3. Kazakh particle ğoj as an existential operator
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. The Kazakh language
    • 2.1 Socio-economic background of the Kazakh language
    • 2.2 General features of Kazakh
    • 2.3 Kazakh data
  • 3. Previous research on ğoj
  • 4. Ğoj in imperative clauses
  • 5. Syntactic distribution of ğoj
    • 5.1 Post-predicative ğoj
    • 5.2 Post-nominal ğoj
  • 6. Pragmatic contribution of ğoj
    • 6.1 Pragmatic contribution of post-predicative ğoj
    • 6.2 Pragmatic contribution of the post-nominal ğoj
  • 7. Semantics of ğoj
    • 7.1 Russian že
    • 7.2 Tundra Yukaghir particle mə(r)=
    • 7.3 Ğoj as an existential operator
  • 8. Conclusions
  • Abbreviations
  • References
• Chapter 4. From focus marking to illocutionary modification: Functional developments of Italian solo ‘only’
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Basic notions of information structure
  • 3. Solo as a focus particle
    • 3.1 Focus particles and information structure
    • 3.2 The meaning of solo
  • 4. Functional developments of solo: Connective uses
  • 5. Functional developments of solo: Illocutive uses
    • 5.1 Directive speech acts
    • 5.2 Assertive speech acts
    • 5.3 A possible bridging context for solo in assertive speech acts
    • 5.4 Illocutive uses of solo: Summary
  • 6. Conclusions
  • References
  • Corpora
• Part II. Information structure as a factor in the interpretation of polysemic and polyfunctional particles
• Chapter 5. Final or medial: Morphosyntactic and functional divergences in discourse particles of the same historical sources
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. A brief historical sketch of Japanese interjectional and final particles
  • 3. Morpho-syntactic differences between interjectional and final particles
  • 4. Discourse-pragmatic differences between interjectional and final particles
    • 4.1 Information status
    • 4.2 Addressee-directedness
    • 4.3 Speaker gender
  • 5. Contrastive features of interjectional and final particles
  • 6. Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Keys to abbreviations
  • References
  • Funding information
• Chapter 6. Types and functions of wa-marked DPs and their structural distribution in a Japanese sentence
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. The definition of topics
  • 3. Overview of Nakamura (2017)
  • 4. Paul and Whitman (2015) on Chinese and Japanese topic constructions
  • 5. Japanese data with multipe wa-marked phrases
  • 6. Japanese left periperal structure
  • 7. Theoretical implications this paper suggests
  • 8. Conclusion and future issues
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
• Chapter 7. Is the information-structural contribution of modal particles in the syntax, in discourse structure, or in both?
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Modal particles vs. discourse particles
  • 3. Modal particles and information structure
  • 4. Ozerov’s model of discourse-level information structure
  • 5. Overview of the history of the French particle quand même
  • 6. Current study on quand même
    • 6.1 Corpus and methodology
    • 6.2 The modal particle quand même, type 1: Backward-looking exhaustive contrast with a scalar expression
    • 6.3 The modal particle quand même, type 2: Forward-looking uncertainty contrast
  • 7. Conclusion
  • References
• Part III. The contribution of discourse particles to the information-structural characterization of illocutionary acts
• Chapter 8. Discourse particles in thetic judgments, in dependent sentences, and in non-finite phrases
  • 1. Introduction: Waltereit’s objection
  • 2. Modal particles in subordinate clauses
  • 3. MP in specific subordinate sentences
  • 4. Prosody as MP-selector
  • 5. MP-immobility
  • 6. MP in nonfinite constructions: Clause syntax or speech act felicity?
  • 7. MP and scene-setting
  • 8. Generalizations
  • 9. Discourse particle or modal particle?
  • 10. MP as CG-operators
  • 11. CG and speech act requirements for individual MPs
  • 12. About-topic
  • 13. Conclusion: Do you speak an epistemic or an MP-language?
  • References
• Chapter 9. Information structure, null case particle and sentence final discourse particle
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Background
    • 2.1 The cartography of syntactic structures
    • 2.2 Some properties of SFPs and MPs
    • 2.3 Some instance of SFPs
    • 2.4 Non-standard questions
  • 3. Null Case particle
  • 4. Implications: how come questions
  • 5. Conclusion
  • References
  • Appendix. The SFP wa
• Chapter 10. The discourse marker hani in Turkish
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Previous research on hani
  • 3. Negated polar questions
  • 4. Negative polar questions and hani constructions
    • 4.1 Hani constructions with wh-intonation
    • 4.2 Hani constructions with the particle ya
    • 4.3 Hani constructions with declarative intonation
  • 5. The difference between hani constructions and negative polar questions
  • 6. Concluding remarks
  • List of abbreviations
  • References
• Chapter 11. Modal particles in Basque: Two cases of interaction between ote and information structure
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. Modal particles in Basque: A brief analysis of common ote
  • 3. MP ote’s dependency on FocP in Eastern dialects
  • 4. Microvariation on the MP ote in North-Eastern dialects: ‘wh-word ote’
  • 5. Conclusions
  • References
• Language index
• Subject index