Discourse structure and syntactic embedding : the German discourse particle 'ja'

Abstract

German discourse particles (DiPs) do not add truth-conditionally relevant meaning but are elements of speaker attitude and indicate a relation between the information in their scope (p) and another piece of information (q) in the context. The DiP ‘ja’ (literally ‘yes’) was claimed to be felicitous with a proposition p that the speaker believes common to both speaker and hearer, or immediately verifiable. However, formalizations modeling this into the use conditions of ‘ja’ fall short on the DiP's discourse function, which is to indicate that p is not used to address the current Question under Discussion but stands in a relation to q (pRq), where q is the information that the speaker makes another context update, pRq is intuitively explanatory, and p is not necessarily known to anyone but the speaker. Regarding prerequisite grammatical properties of the DiP's host constructions, data show that ‘ja’ is not restricted to assertive, root-like environments and defies predictions about not being able to appear in the scope of descriptive operators. Instead the data suggest that the DiP's licitness in surprising positions depends on information-structural factors.