The Role of German Particles in Questions

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This project investigates how discourse particles (DiPs) in German (e.g., 'denn', 'bloss', 'schon') modify the illocutionary act carried out by a question. Combining formal tools and psycho/neurolinguistic research, it strives to identify and compositionally derive the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic constraints that govern this modification and to explore the cognitive mechanisms that underlie the processing and licensing of discourse particles in questions. Building on findings from the first phase of the project, this goal is articulated in three objectives.First, while the first phase established correlates of various DiP-licensing violations, the second phase aims for a detailed assessment of the psycholinguistic processes underlying these correlates, and for their integration into the sentence comprehension literature. In two series of experiments, we will (1) disentangle the contribution of strictly linguistic processes from illusory licensing processes, and will (2) distinguish semantic and pragmatic processing pathways. All experiments will monitor the processing of DiPs and negative polarity items (NPIs) to allow a direct comparison and a better understanding of long-distance licensing processes at the interface of syntax, semantics and pragmatics.Second, while the first phase concentrated on in situ discourse particles attached to the verbal spine, the second phase extends our investigations to ex situ particles forming a constituent with the wh-phrase. Pragmatically, ex situ but not in situ particles mandatorily carry an emphatic undertone. This raises interesting issues concerning the formal characterization of emphasis and its composition with wh-phrases. Semantically, ex situ particles have more scope freedom than in situ particles. Determining how the scope of the particles interacts with that of how many-phrases provides novel testing ground for current competing approaches.Third, we are going to apply high-end methods for the analysis of neurolinguistic data to existing and new data collected in P1 and P6. While the first phase concentrated on traditional methods of neurolinguistic data analyses, the oscillatory brain dynamics in specific time-frequency bands will be systematically studied during the second phase to explore the cognitive mechanisms that underlie the processing of questions.