engleski

The description of modal particles and their functional equivalents in a cross-linguistic perspective: the case of German, Croatian and English

The aim of the paper is to present a model for the cross-linguistic description of the meanings of modal particles (MP) and their functional equivalents, as well as to address possible problems in the analysis of their functions. The languages taken into account are German, Croatian and English. MPs constitute a clear-cut functional class in some Germanic and Slavic languages, such as German (e.g. aber, auch, bloß, denn, doch, gleich, eben, ja, nur, schon) and Croatian (e.g. pa, ma, ta, daj, eto, li, nego, ono), while their functional equivalents in English belong to the category of adverbs (e.g. then, just), interjections (oh, boy), interrogative expressions (how come), phraseological expressions (on earth, you know, but of course), specific syntactic constructions (do you mean to tell me, don’t hesitate to, you’re welcome to, may well), emphatic additions of the verb do or go, stress patterns and intonation. Some Italian equivalents of these linguistic items will be discussed, as well. For example, pragmatic markers in Italian can be considered to be (partially) functional equivalents of MPs, e.g. beh, guarda, ma. The following example shows the use of MPs in German and Croatian with the respective functional equivalents in English and Italian: Ger. Wie hat er das bloß/nur gemacht? Cro. Kako li je uspio to napraviti? Eng. How on earth did he manage to do it? It. Ma come (c')è riuscito a farlo? / Ma com' e' che ce l'ha fatta a farlo? While MPs do not appear in all languages, we argue that their function can be considered as universal. Difficulties in describing MPs arise mostly from the relational aspect of their meaning, i.e. they relate the utterance in which they occur to the pragmatic context (cf. Diewald et al. 2009: 196– 199, Diewald 2007: 134). The particle meanings can be described in terms of the speaker's – verbalized or unverbalized – assumptions about the state of affairs in the context of the communication (cf. ibid.). Difficulties appear if approaching these elements in a cross-linguistic perspective due to differences in their syntactic distribution and with respect to their morphosyntactic properties. While for example German MPs exclusively occur in the so-called middle field of the sentence, the position of Croatian MPs, varies depending on the source category from which the MP originates. Other than these, other issues will be discussed as well. The model proposed for the semantic description of MPs and of their functional equivalents was developed on the basis of a corpus analysis, taking into account the respective pragmatic context, the sentence type in which an MP occurs, the speech act that is performed, as well as its morphosyntactic properties. Finally, the use of this descriptive model in a contrastive a modal particle lexicon is discussed.

Modal particles ; modality ; Croatian ; German ; English

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