Modal particles and their functional equivalents: A speech-act-theoretic approach

Modal particles are abundant in German, but rather rare in many other langu ages, e.g., Romance languages. While it is evident that some have more moda l particles than others, it seems difficult to conceive of the function of modal particles as being restricted to particular languages. The intuition underlying this article is that if, e.g., the Romance languages have fewer modal particles than German, they should have other means of expressing the same function. It is claimed that this function essentially consists in ac commodating the speech act at minimal linguistic expense to the speech situ ation. 'At minimal expense' means that accommodation is not done explicitly ; rather, it is achieved by evoking a different speech situation that typic ally would fit that speech act. This is studied for the French particle qua nd meme, the Italian, Spanish and Portuguese diminutive, and the 'backcheck ing' imperfect occurring in various languages, as in What was your name? or Who got the wine? Besides the minimality of linguistic expression of a pra gmatic function, these forms share certain properties in their diachronic g enesis: they arise through metonymic semantic change from their non-modal c ounterparts, the relevant metonymy taking as its conceptual basis a contigu ity between a sound chain and a speech situation. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.