In many languages, pragmatic or discourse particles are a crucial means within linguistic communication. They are expressions that in one way or another indicate the speaker's
assumptions, attitudes, communicative strategies and conversational goals in a particular discourse situation. They are typically also of crucial importance in establishing discourse coherence.
These expressions, however, are also well-known for their polyfunctionality.
The German particle
'doch', for instance, can function as a contrastive adverb, a modal particle or a response
particle, and also within its modal use usually a distinction is made between different
functions (cf. Foolen 2006, Karagjosova 2004, 2012). It is a notoriously difficult challenge
for semantics/pragmatics to understand what exactly these functions are and, secondly,
how they relate to each other.
It has by now become commonplace to assume that this polyfunctionality at least
partly corresponds to different layers or dimensions of meaning: a particle can for example
target the propositional content in one function, the speech act in another (e.g.
Karagjosova 2004, Egg 2013 on modal particles in German). Other functions seem to
pertain rather to the level of information-structure (e.g. those of focus particles (Konig
1991) and topic markers) or involve coherence relations between units of discourse (connective
or text-structuring functions, as in e.g. Fraser 1999). While this reference to
different layers of discourse often seems an intuitive way of thinking about the different
usages, it also raises many important questions. These range from more methodological
ones (what tests can we use to argue for particles working at a certain dimension?) to
more fundamental ones (what structure do notions such as common ground and context
need to have for an adequate description of particles?).
The goal of the present workshop is contribute to these central questions which have
often been implicit in particle research. In this way we hope to arrive at a clearer picture
of the dimensions of meaning in the context of particle research. We aim to bring
together different perspectives on these matters, both from a more cognitive and a more
formal semantic approach.
The workshop is organized by Kees Thijs and Corien Bary and part of the ERC project Unraveling the Language of Perspective (ERC Starting Grant 338421-Perspective).
There will be no workshop fee. If you are interested in attending the workshop, please send an email to k.thijs@ftr.ru.nl.
