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Focus particles as utterances – the case of German ausgerechnet!

Focus particles as utterances – the case of German ausgerechnet! Focus particles such as auch “also”, nur “only” and sogar “even” form a closed word class and do not occur as immediate constituents in German. They usually have to adjoin to an associated focus constituent and are even occasionally referred to as function words. It is quite surprising that the focus particle ausgerechnet “of all X” (Peter kommt ausgerechnet heute “Peter is coming today of all days”) also occurs as an independent utterance as in Peter kommt heute. Ausgerechnet! “Peter is coming today. Of all days!”. The article describes this little studied (colloquial) use of ausgerechnet. It presents a detailed analysis of the focus particle ausgerechnet showing that it is an expressive item in the sense of Christopher Potts. The expressive semantics motivates its use as an utterance in analogy to exclamations with expressives such as the interjection Donnerwetter! “Oh dear!” or the adjective Toll! “great”. The analysis is presented in a construction-based framework and illustrates the need to integrate core and peripheral grammatical phenomena. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Acta Linguistica Hafniensia Taylor & Francis

Focus particles as utterances – the case of German ausgerechnet!

Ørsnes, Bjarne
Acta Linguistica Hafniensia , Volume 54 (2): 28 – Jul 3, 2022
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28 pages

Focus particles as utterances – the case of German ausgerechnet!

Abstract

Focus particles such as auch “also”, nur “only” and sogar “even” form a closed word class and do not occur as immediate constituents in German. They usually have to adjoin to an associated focus constituent and are even occasionally referred to as function words. It is quite surprising that the focus particle ausgerechnet “of all X” (Peter kommt ausgerechnet heute “Peter is coming today of all days”) also occurs as an independent...
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Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Copyright
© 2022 The Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen
ISSN
1949-0763
eISSN
0374-0463
DOI
10.1080/03740463.2022.2131976
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Focus particles such as auch “also”, nur “only” and sogar “even” form a closed word class and do not occur as immediate constituents in German. They usually have to adjoin to an associated focus constituent and are even occasionally referred to as function words. It is quite surprising that the focus particle ausgerechnet “of all X” (Peter kommt ausgerechnet heute “Peter is coming today of all days”) also occurs as an independent utterance as in Peter kommt heute. Ausgerechnet! “Peter is coming today. Of all days!”. The article describes this little studied (colloquial) use of ausgerechnet. It presents a detailed analysis of the focus particle ausgerechnet showing that it is an expressive item in the sense of Christopher Potts. The expressive semantics motivates its use as an utterance in analogy to exclamations with expressives such as the interjection Donnerwetter! “Oh dear!” or the adjective Toll! “great”. The analysis is presented in a construction-based framework and illustrates the need to integrate core and peripheral grammatical phenomena.

Journal

Acta Linguistica Hafniensia – Taylor & Francis

Published: Jul 3, 2022

Keywords: Focus particles; expressives; exclamations; construction grammar; analogy

References

  • Focus Particles Inside Prepositional Phrases: A Comparison of Dutch, English, and German
  • On the Syntax of Verb–initial Exclamatives
  • Die Brigitte nun kann der Hans nicht ausstehen – gebundene Topiks im Deutschen
  • Focus Particles in the Romance and Germanic Languages. Corpus-Based and Experimental Approaches
  • From a Focus Particle to a Conjunction: Diachronic and Synchronic Analysis of German zumal
  • Construction Grammar
  • What Do Newsmark-Type Responses Invite? The Response Space After German echt
  • Perspectival Expressives
  • You Hoboken! Semantics of an Expressive Label Maker
  • The Meaning of Utterance-Final Even
  • Leftmost Peripheral Adverbs and Adjectives in German
  • Constructional Analogy and Reanalysis in Possessive Applicatives
  • Die prototypische Interjektion – ein Definitionsvorschlag
  • The Expressive Dimension
  • Die exklusiven expositiven Partikeln genau, eben und Ausgerechnet und ihre polnischen Entsprechungen
  • The Interaction Between Scalar Particles and Illocutionary Force in Imperatives
  • Catalan Focus Markers as Discourse Particles
  • The Linguistic Realization of Information Packaging