A unified account of the semantics of discourse particles

Markus Egg
Humboldt-Universität Berlin


Abstract

The paper presents an approach to discourse particles on the example of German "doch" that assigns to them very specific semantic interpretations that still cover a wide range of uses of the particles. This analysis highlights the role of discourse particles in managing the common ground and crucially takes into account that discourse particles can refer not only to utterances they are a part of and to previously uttered utterances, but also to felicity conditions of these utterances.