Zum Gebrauch der Modalpartikel denn in Fragesätzen. Eine korpusbasierte Untersuchung

Thurmair, Maria

doi:10.1515/9783111353166.377

Cited by 5 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…It has been known for a long time that whether denn is felicitous in a question Q depends in some way on the discourse leading up to Q (e.g., König 1977;Thurmair 1991). In truly out-of-the-blue contexts, certain denn-questions such as (6) are infelicitous.…”

Section: Discourse Anaphoricitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…By contrast, in the scenario in (9), where it is B that wakes A, it is acceptable for A, the wakee, to ask the same question. According to a common position in the literature (a.o., Franck 1980;Hentschel and Weydt 1983;Thurmair 1991;Kwon 2005;Gutzmann 2015), denn indicates that the questioning act is in some way externally motivated. For instance, according to Thurmair (1991, p. 378), denn signals that the reason why the speaker is asking the question can be found in the immediate utterance context.…”

Section: Discourse Anaphoricitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…What an interlocutor achieves by doing this is to signal that getting an answer is especially important to her-in other words, that she is interested. 18 Authors subscribing to the external-motivation view on denn (e.g., Thurmair 1991;Kwon 2005) also generally acknowledge that the external motivation for the questioning act can be supplied by the nonlinguistic context.…”

Section: Non-linguistic Contextual Informationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Denn as a highlighting-sensitive particle

Theiler

2020

Linguist and Philos

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This paper develops an account of the German discourse particle denn that captures the meaning contribution of this particle in polar questions, wh-questions, and certain conditional antecedents in a unified way. It is shown that the behavior of denn exhibits an asymmetry between polar and wh-interrogatives, which can be captured by treating the particle as sensitive to the property highlighted by its containing clause, in the sense of Roelofsen and Farkas (Language 91(2):359–414, 2015). In addition, the paper argues that highlighting-sensitivity should be incorporated in the account of another discourse particle, German überhaupt, and discusses how the proposed account of discourse particle denn may be extended to also cover the use of denn as a causal conjunction.

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Section: Discourse Anaphoricitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discourse Anaphoricitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Non-linguistic Contextual Informationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Denn as a highlighting-sensitive particle

Theiler

2020

Linguist and Philos

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“…We selected 39 wh questions and 39 polar questions that were syntactically and lexically ambiguous between a rhetorical and an information seeking reading. They aU contained the particle "denn" which is frequently used in both RQs and ISQs in German [15). All target interrogatives and contexts were constructed such that the nuclear accent was expected on the fmal object (e.g., Domino in Wer spielt denn Domino?…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The prosodic marking of rhetorical questions in German

Wochner

Schlegel²,

Dehé

et al. 2015

Interspeech 2015

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This study investigates the prosody of rhetorical questions in German. In an interaction study we examined how speakers use boundary tones, pitch, duration and voice quality to mark syntactically ambiguous questions as rhetorical or information seeking. To this end, speakers produced identical interrogatives (polar and wh questions) in rhetorical and information seeking contexts. The results show that, phonologically, rhetorical questions end in low boundary tones more often, but the difference is minimal (5%), especially compared to the effect of interrogative type on boundary tones (polar questions are rising and wh questions are falling in more than 90% of the cases, respectively). Phonetically, rhetorical questions are characterized by longer utterance durations and lower initial pitch. Furthermore, the first constituent (wh word or verb) is produced with a softer voice compared to information seeking questions. Overall the results show that there are prosodic differences between RQs and ISQs for both polar and wh questions. There seems to be a tendency for rhetoricity to be signalled early on in the utterance in both polar and wh questions. Furthermore, the phonetic cues for disambiguation are stronger in wh questions than in polar questions.

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“…If the particle schon is combined with another particle, denn (‘then’) – as in (3c) – the rhetorical reading is reinforced (Meibauer, 1986: 119). On its own, denn , which expresses a speaker’s concern (Bayer et al, 2016: 593), can be used in both illocution types (Thurmair, 1991) and is therefore considered to be ambiguous.…”

Section: Rhqs In German and Italianmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rhetorical question comprehension by Italian–German bilingual children

Geiss¹,

Ferin

Marinis

et al. 2023

Second Language Research

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This study investigates for the first time the comprehension of rhetorical questions (RhQs) in bilingual children. RhQs are non-canonical questions, as they are not used to request information, but to express the speaker’s belief that the answer is already obvious. This special pragmatic meaning often arises by means of specific prosodic and lexical-syntactic cues. Being childhood learners, children have to acquire the concept of rhetoricity, but being bilinguals, they further need to acquire the different cues marking RhQs in their two languages. We tested 85 bilingual children (aged 6–9 years) with Italian as heritage language (HL) and German as majority language (ML) in both of their languages, using a forced-choice comprehension task. Our results show that RhQ comprehension improves with age in both languages. Bilingual children are able to exploit prosodic and syntactic cues to comprehend RhQs in their ML and HL with a slight advantage in the ML. This advantage could be either an effect of the cues used in the experiments in the two languages or of a higher proficiency in the ML. In addition, our results point to a later acquisition of prosodic rhetorical cues, which has implications for bilingual acquisition of non-canonicity in general.

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Zum Gebrauch der Modalpartikel denn in Fragesätzen. Eine korpusbasierte Untersuchung

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

Denn as a highlighting-sensitive particle

Denn as a highlighting-sensitive particle

The prosodic marking of rhetorical questions in German

Rhetorical question comprehension by Italian–German bilingual children

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