German modal particles and recent typological perspectives on epistemicity and assertions

Abstract

This paper investigates German modal particles in the light of recent typological work on epistemic marking in assertions. The starting point is the semantic flip observed in the meaning of particles between assertions and interrogations: under the name “interrogative flip”, this feature has recently become a well-established test for egophoricity in a variety of languages. Following this strain of thought, I show that the kind of intersubjective modality marked by modal particles is essentially egophoric: propositional attitudes have to be associated to a modal judge and her ratifier; these modal roles, which need not be epistemic, are instantiated on interaction participants only in a second step, via additional markers (most prominently sentence mood). Further recent developments try to mingle egophoricity with speech act theory, using the concept of “enimitives”, a class of markers devoted to “uncontroversial assertion”. While the concept of enimitives proves inadequate for the fine-grained studies of German modal particles, I show that it provides helpful insights into the intricacy of sentence types and epistemicity-in-interaction.