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

目前的研究建议旨在发展一个明确的句法解释的言外意义，即话语的意义。研究将从关于词序在小句类型中的作用的标准概括开始，并将从那里转向对小句功能结构的彻底调查。语篇助词不仅在德语中存在，而且在孟加拉语等关系较弱的语言中也存在，它们在话语意义的形成中起着核心作用。他们把基本的句子类型，如问题，变成更细粒度的类型，如反问句，惊讶问题，不赞成问题等。工作假设是，它们已经从异质来源（通常是副词）转变为功能头部的储备，并因此以基本方式为子句的功能设置做出贡献。语序的某些选择，有时与话语小品相结合，产生一种强调的特征（也称为“mirativity”），这是话语表达的典型特征，通常赋予它们感叹的味道。德语和孟加拉语都提供了很好的理由来假设（至少某些形式的）强调标记在语法中是“固有的”，并且必须与信息结构区分开来。考虑德语和孟加拉语将有助于重新定位对话语结构的研究，从对所谓“左外围”的限制性关注转向包括下段在内的整个从句，更重要的是，也包括后语空间。在印度-雅利安语言中，孟加拉语以其丰富的语词词汇而闻名，是与德语比较的首选。尽管就使用人数而言，它现在是世界上第六大语言，但在语言学上对它的研究还很不足。关于孟加拉语的理论工作的一个分支将是编写关于孟加拉语粒子的参考著作和数据库，这将对更广泛的读者有用。

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.