Discourse particles

Abstract

In a narrow sense, discourse particles are often understood to be equivalent to modal particles. Modal particles may express different degrees of probability of, attitudes towards, and expectations about the propositional content of an utterance as well as updates to the common ground. Most importantly, they change the truth-conditional meaning of utterances that contain them, but rather add pragmatic meaning. Moreover, discourse particles are typically not inflected, bear no grammatical relationship to other elements of the sentence, and may be phonologically ill-formed. The category of discourse regulation relates to interactional aspects of signed conversations and therefore includes those discourse particles that steer the flow of dialogues and establish smooth transitions between turns of conversation partners. Turn-taking signals are used when a signer wishes to open a turn, end a turn, or hold the conversational floor. When palm-up is used at the beginning of a turn, the hands are raised and turned to a signing position.