Clause Structure and Utterance Meaning - Word Order, Particles and Emphasis

本研究旨在开发一种对言外意义，即话语意义的显式句法解释。研究将从关于语序在小句类型中的作用的标准概括开始，并将从那里转移到对小句的功能结构的彻底调查。语篇助词不仅存在于德语中，也存在于孟加拉语等关联性较弱的语言中，在话语意义的形成中起着核心作用。它们将基本的句子类型如疑问句转变为更细粒度的类型，如反问句、意外问句、反对问句等。工作假设是，它们已经从异质来源(通常是副词)转移到功能中心语的储备库中，因此在根本上对小句的功能设置做出了贡献。语序的某些选择，有时与话语助词结合在一起，会产生一种强调的特征(也称为“奇迹”)，这是话语表达方面的典型特征，往往赋予它们一种感叹的味道。德语和孟加拉语都提供了充分的理由，认为(至少某些形式的)强调标记在语法上是固定的，必须与信息结构区分开来。考虑德语和孟加拉语将有助于将话语结构的研究从局限于所谓的“左边缘”转向整个小句，包括较低的部分，更重要的是，也包括动词后空间。在印度-雅利安语言中，孟加拉语以其丰富的助词词汇而闻名，是与德语进行比较的首选语言。虽然就说英语的人数而言，它现在是世界上第六大语言，但在语言学方面还没有得到充分的研究。关于孟加拉的理论工作的一个分支将是开发关于孟加拉粒子的参考工作和数据库，这对更广泛的受众应该是有用的。

The present research proposal aims at the development of an explicit syntactic account of illocutionary meaning, i.e. the meaning of utterances. Research will start from standard generalizations about the role of word order in clausal typing and will move from there to a thorough investigation of the functional architecture of the clause. Discourse particles as they are found in German, but also in weakly related languages such as Bangla, play a central role in the for-mation of utterance meaning. They turn basic sentence types such as questions into more fine-grained types such as rhetorical questions, surprise questions, disapproval questions etc. The working hypothesis is that they have shifted from heterogeneous sources (often adverbs) to the repertory of functional heads, and as such contribute in fundamental ways to the functional set-up of the clause. Certain options of word order, sometimes in combination with discourse particles, yield an emphatic character (also called "mirativity") that is typical for the expressive side of utterances and often endows them with an exclamative flavor. Both German and Bangla offer good reasons to assume that (at least certain forms of) emphatic marking is "hard-wired" in grammar, and that it must be distinguished from information structure. Consideration of German and Bangla will help reorienting research on utterance structure from a restrictive focus on the so-called "left periphery" to the entire clause including lower segments and, importantly, also the post-verbal space. Among the Indo-Aryan languages, Bangla is known for its rich particle vocabulary and is as such a top candidate for comparison with German. Although it is now the sixth largest language of the world in terms of the number of speakers, it is linguistically under-researched. An offshoot of the theoretical work on Bangla will be the development of a reference work and a data bank on Bangla particles which should be useful for a broader audience.