Modal particles in different communicative types

Abstract

The distribution and frequency of individual heterosemes of a hyperlemma in basic communicative types, which are distinguished according to their primary expression of dialogicity (i.e. their factual communicative immediacy/distance), is shown to be dependent on the interplay of i) the heteroseme’s basic word class function, ii) its degree of grammaticalization, and iii) the presence of secondary (embedded or simulated) communicative situations (i.e. conceptual immediacy/distance) in the linguistic material. The items investigated aredenn‘then’,ruhig‘quiet’, ‘silent’, ‘peaceful’ andvielleicht‘maybe’ in German, which as hyperlemmas incorporate a number of distinct heterosemes (denn, for example, is used as conjunction, comparative particle, modal particle etc.). The focus of this corpus-based investigation is on the modal particle functions of the three hyperlemmas. The corpora used are distinguished according to primary degree of communicative immediacy/distance.