The landscape of non-canonical ‘only’ in German

1 Introduction

The focus particle nur in (1) is the German equivalent of English only. Its function is to associate with a focused constituent (e.g., ins Schwimmbad ‘to the swimming pool’ in [1]) and to exclude alternatives to the focused constituent (see, e.g., Büring and Hartmann 2001; König 1991; for seminal work).

It is well known that German nur also has modal particle readings in wh-questions and imperatives (e.g., Thurmair 2013), which have recently been investigated experimentally (Dörre 2018; Dörre et al. 2018; Dörre and Trotzke 2019). In this paper, we would like to highlight another non-canonical use of German nur (that is, another use as a non-focus particle) that has not been investigated empirically so far. In the following two examples, nur appears in a temporal adverbial clause (2a) and in an adverbial clause of manner (2b):

In neither of these examples does the interpretation of nur correspond to the canonical focus particle reading, as indicated by the English translations in (2a) and (2b). Rather, the two examples illustrate non-canonical uses of nur, for which we assume that they point to a maximum on a scale (e.g., scale of amount of time, according to which an action is performed in [2a]; scale of loudness in [2b]). This paper is the first to experimentally compare those uses in adverbial clauses to the canonical focus particle use of German nur and to particle-less sentences. In doing so, our general goal is to arrive at a more comprehensive picture of the landscape of non-canonical ‘only’ in German.

The paper is structured as follows. Sections 2–5 report on a series of experiments that tried to identify to what extent the use of nur in examples like (2) above can affect the meaning of utterances. In our exploration of non-canonical nur, we wanted to leave the door open for all sorts of potential meaning contributions, ranging from its role as a verbal modifier to a modifier of the illocutionary level of utterances. In particular, we compare the uses in (2) to the canonical use of nur as focus particle (Section 2), to several cases of scalar interpretations either involving or not involving non-canonical nur (Sections 3 and 4), and to modal particles that effect the illocutionary level of utterances (Section 5). Section 6 concludes by summarizing the experimental results and indicating where the non-canonical use in adverbial clauses fits in the broader landscape of non-canonical ‘only’ in German.

2 Experiment 1: non-canonical ‘only’ in temporal adverbial clauses

In Experiment 1, we focused on temporal adverbial clauses like (2a) above and wanted to know whether native speakers of German confirm our judgment that examples like (2a) are systematically associated with a reading of nur that does not involve the canonical focus particle interpretation in (1). We therefore compared examples like (2a) to cases without nur, to cases replacing nur with German ‘always’ (immer) – because this is the reading we hypothesized for (2a), due to the pointing to a maximum on a scale of amount of time – and to cases like (3), where nur appears in a temporal adverbial clause but nevertheless receives the canonical focus particle interpretation due to a different syntactic position:

We conducted a judgment experiment where participants had to rate the frequency with which the action expressed by the sentences containing nur is performed. We hypothesized that if the non-canonical use of nur in (2a) points to a maximum on a scale of amount of time, resembling the temporal interpretation of ‘always’, ratings should not differ from the sentences containing ‘always’. Furthermore, if canonical nur in (3) highlights the exclusion of times when an action can be performed, ratings should differ from the other conditions insofar as the performed action is judged as less frequent.

2.2 Results

The mean overall rating for the experimental sentences was 3.8 (SD 1.5), indicating that participants were rather vague regarding the temporal interpretation of the items. Nevertheless, there was no value of 1–6 that was not given, indicating that the sentences indeed vary in their temporal interpretations.

The ratings for the condition plain and the condition always were the highest (mean of 4.1), closely followed by the rating for the condition noncan-only (3.9). The rating for the condition can-only was the lowest (3.0). Table 1 depicts the mean ratings for the four experimental conditions.

In order to see whether the ratings for the conditions differ from each other, we analyzed them further by linear mixed models (R Core Team 2017, package lme4, Bates et al. 2015) with rating as the dependent variable, condition (plain, can-only, noncan-only, always) as the fixed factor, and participants and items as random effects. There was no significant difference between the conditions plain and always (t = −0.27, reference level = always), between noncan-only and always (t = −0.85, reference level = always), or between and plain and noncan-only (t = −0.59, reference level = plain), indicating that the sentences in all three conditions lead to the same temporal interpretation. However, and crucially, there was a significant difference between the conditions plain and can-only (β = −1.12, SE = 0.22, t = −4.99, p < 0.001, reference level = plain), between always and can-only (β = −1.18, SE = 0.22, t = −5.26, p < 0.001, reference level = always), and between noncan-only and can-only (β = −0.99, SE = 0.23, t = −4.36, p < 0.001, reference level = noncan-only). This indicates that the temporal interpretation of sentences containing canonical nur differs from the other three conditions insofar as the performance of the action expressed by the sentence containing canonical nur was rated as less frequent (see Figure 1).

Figure 1:

Ratings for the conditions; error bars represent a 95% confidence interval.

3 Experiment 2: non-canonical ‘only’ in adverbial clauses of manner

In Experiment 2, we investigated the meaning effect of non-canonical nur in another adverbial environment: adverbial clauses of manner. We hypothesized that this adverbial environment might feature a clearer distinction between “plain” utterances and utterances containing non-canonical nur because the relevant readings of non-canonical nur in Experiment 1 above were based on a temporal scale (i.e., the event is taking place “more often”), whereas adverbial clauses of manner in Experiment 2 introduce a scale based on intensity scales (e.g., Beltrama and Trotzke 2019). To this end, we conducted a judgment experiment with the particle nur embedded in relevant adverbial clauses (4) and with the plain clauses without the particle.

4 Experiment 3: non-canonical ‘only’ in adverbial clauses of manner with scales controlled for

In Experiment 3, we chose adverbial clauses of manner that are inherently related to sound levels that point to different portions on a scale, with points ranging from maximum (max), as exemplified in (5), through medium (med), in (6), to minimum (min), in (7).

If non-canonical nur in those clauses points to a maximum on a scale, we hypothesize that there will be differences between the clauses containing non-canonical nur and the same clause containing no particle, but only in the conditions med or min. Due to a ceiling effect, we do not expect to find differences when the condition is max (see Experiment 2 above).

5 Experiment 4: non-canonical ‘only’ and illocutionary effects

In Experiment 4, we again investigated the interpretation of non-canonical nur in adverbial clauses of manner, but this time comparing non-canonical nur, as in (8), not only to the same clauses without the particle as in (9), but also contrasting the use of non-canonical nur with the German modal particle halt ‘just/simply’, as in (10). The modal particle halt operates at the illocutionary level and signals that the speaker is “downtoning” the relevance of the proposition in a way that is plausible for the hearer (see Autenrieth 2015 for a detailed study).

The reason for including a modal particle that can be used in these adverbial clauses and thus the main difference to Experiment 3 is that the question the participants had to answer did not target the propositional meaning dimension (how loudly is Tom calling the kids?), but the illocutionary meaning dimension (how dedicated is Tom according to the speaker’s perspective when Tom performs the action?).

We expect the ratings for the sentences containing the modal particle halt (just) to differ from those of the sentences without a particle (plain). If non-canonical nur in these clauses targets the illocutionary meaning dimension, parallel to what we expect for the modal particle halt, ratings for the condition only should differ from those for the condition plain as well.

6 General discussion

In this paper, we experimentally investigated a non-canonical use of German ‘only’ that has not been studied in detail before, namely its non-canonical use in adverbial clauses. We submit that an investigation into this use of German nur is necessary to arrive at a more comprehensive picture of the landscape of non-canonical ‘only’ in German. We already know that there are several non-canonical uses of nur in both wh-questions and imperatives (and also in optative sentences; see Grosz 2014), but the use explored in the present paper has not been empirically studied before.

Interestingly, our findings suggest that while the use of non-canonical nur in adverbial clauses differs from the canonical focus particle interpretation (Experiment 1), this use does not affect the meaning of utterances – neither at the propositional (Experiments 2 and 3) nor at the illocutionary level (Experiment 4). In other words, in contrast to our introspective intuition that non-canonical nur in adverbial clauses features a distinct meaning contribution, we could not confirm this native-speaker intuition by experimental methods.

This opens a path for several interesting theoretical hypotheses of why the element nur in these environments seems to be semantically “invisible” to our participants, and in this brief conclusion we cannot discuss all of them – also because testing those hypotheses would require additional experiments.

One theoretical hypothesis that we would like to mention nevertheless is that this use of non-canonical nur could in fact be a grammaticalized element. Note that other focus particles have also been argued to grammaticalize (e.g., Giannakidou and Yoon 2016). Non-canonical nur in adverbial clauses occurs in configurations where the clause itself can be associated with a strengthening meaning (e.g., ‘as loudly as he (possibly) can’ or ‘When(ever) I can, I go …’) that is signaled by nur as well. But instead of further strengthening this meaning, nur becomes invisible and merely (grammatically) marks this strengthening context. This is a grammaticalization path that has also already been claimed for German modal particles: for instance, Bayer (2012) has argued that the German question particle denn (lit. ‘then’) does not modify the meaning of a question (by, e.g., yielding a stronger version of the relevant question), but rather denn has grammaticalized into an element that simply marks that the utterance is a question in the first place. In a similar vein, we could hypothesize that non-canonical nur does not modify or strengthen the meaning of the adverbial clause either, but is merely a marker for the strengthened context (just like denn is a question marker). Needless to say, and as mentioned above, this is but one way to make sense of the challenging data we found in our experiments, and we leave it to future research to join us in further investigating the whole landscape of non-canonical uses of German ‘only’.