Ja doch wohl C? Modal Particles in German as C-related elements

Abstract

The article argues that Modal Particles (MPs) in German constitute low, intrasentential, C-related elements: rather than being adverbs, MPs constitute a class of emergent functional heads that spell out sentence type features. This categorisation explains many of the hitherto miraculous properties of MPs. Alternative analyses assume that MPs are adverbs, and line up in the specifier positions of a functional cascade that constitutes a clause in 'cartographic' approaches to syntactic modelling. These analyses fail to describe the properties of MPs and adverbs in German, I claim. The emergence of MPs follows a general trend in the development of German to express grammatical properties periphrastically. © 2014 The Editorial Board of Studia Linguistica.