Volume 28, Issue 4 - Special edition on particles

This paper proposes a diachronic analysis of the grammaticalization of a marker of negation into a yes / no question particle in Chinese. I propose that the input to the reanalysis was a v P-neg- v P disjunctive question in which the second v P was projected by a negative auxiliary. Head movement of this auxiliary to the head of an immediately dominating disjunction phrase allowed the negator to enter into an Agree relation with interrogative C and check the [Q] feature there. In time, the negator acquired the [ u Q] feature originally on the disjunction. This allowed the negator to subsequently be base merged in C and function as a Q particle.

Discourse particles provide important clues to our understanding of the syntax-to-discourse relation. They are sensitive to sentence types and utterance contexts. As such they seem to contribute to the determination of illocutionary force. After providing some general background information on discourse particles, the present article focuses on the role of discourse particles in German constituent questions. Syntactic evidence is provided which suggests that they are pre-VP functional heads which can to some extent be stacked. It is shown how the particles under consideration can access the force system, and how this access can proceed even in cases in which they occur in embedded clauses. After providing the basic architecture, we investigate the role of these particles in “special questions”, questions which are not interpreted as simple requests for information. The syntactic discussion is then extended to cases in which the discourse particle forms a constituent with a wh-phrase – [wh+Prt] –, as well as to cases in which this constituent interacts with particles in pre-VP position. The [wh+Prt] construction offers important evidence both in favor of the head status of the particles under investigation and in favor of the existence of distinctive syntactic properties of special questions, especially so-called “surprise-disapproval questions”. Finally, data on surprise-disapproval questions in a Northern Italian dialect as well as in an Indo-Aryan language suggest that the findings about special questions in German are likely to fall under cross-linguistic generalizations.

In this paper, I analyse German and Italian modal particles and argue that they are deficient (i.e., weak) adverbs merged with dedicated functional constituents of the Mood/Mod field. I also show that sentence-initial and sentence-final particles are not one and the same element. In particular, sentence-final particles are not (functional) heads in the left-periphery of the clause and cannot be derived by movement of their complement to their specifier. They are instead merged with functional constituents of the IP-internal Mood/Mod field, like sentence-internal particles, and their final position is derived by remnant movement of what follows the particle to a specifier higher than the particle, similarly to what happens with right-dislocated constituents. Verb-based particles are also briefly discussed. In their sentence-final use, they are shown to have the same syntax as adverb-based particles; in their sentence-initial use, they are instead merged in the CP layer.

Coptic (Ancient Egyptian, 3 rd to 12 th c. CE) is a language of the isolating/analytic type, with an almost one-to-one correspondence between functional morphemes and words. The present study aims at an exhaustive description and analysis of the language's large and diversified inventory of particle words. Functional or grammatical particles encode code tense, aspect, mood categories on the one hand and register wh-dependencies in a broad range of focus-sensitive constructions on the other hand. The central hypotheses are: (i) functional particles are not acategorial parts of speech, but rather fall into two distinct classes of verb-related and complementizer-related categories, (ii) they are not in any sense structurally deficient heads: they can project a specifier position (when endowed with an EPP feature) and they can act as phase heads and (iii) the core syntax of the language is laid down by the positive setting of an analyticity macroparameter (Huang, Sino–Kwa: Analyticity, parametric theory, and the lexical-functional divide, 2008). High analyticity involves the division of labor between defective verbal categories and morphologically independent tense particles, which agree with but do not attract the main verb.