Common ground management: Modal particles, illocutionary negation and verum

Abstract

This paper argues that there are operators with a common ground (CG) managing function that can influence the truth-conditional meaning of a sentence even though their meaning usually is taken not to be truth-conditional. It proposes that modal particles, as well as conversational epistemic operators?like the VERUM operator, and illocutionary negation expressed as the operator FALSUM, are CG-managing operators. The paper commences with a presentation on the basic set of data, where focus is on sentences with an epistemic modal verb, negation and the modal particle doch . It discusses the notion of CG and looks at the meaning and function of the FALSUM operator and the particles doch and ja . Then, it explains why the data presented pattern the way they do. A section extends the empirical base to modal particles not presented in the original data set and explains the observed effects. VERUM is analyzed and compared with FALSUM. Keywords:common ground (CG); doch ; FALSUM; illocutionary negation; ja ; modal particles; truth-conditional meaning; VERUM