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Title: What are particles good for?
Running head: What are particles good for?
Author: Harald Weydt
0. Introduction
Since the sixties, particles have aroused the interest of linguists far and wide. The various classifications into parts of speech or word classes that particles have undergone in the recent years will not be discussed here. Most of what will be discussed will be illustrated with German Abtönungspartikeln (~ modal particles?), and, for reasons of economy, with German aber, but it should be clear from the beginning that it will hold true for particles of other classes as well and not only for German but also for other languages.
Instead of discussing particle classifications and the respective criteria[1], I would like to raise the basic question of what are Abtönungspartikeln good for or why one uses Abtönungspartikeln. This question has not really been considered in this direct way and that is why I think it is particularly (!) suitable for a new look at an old subject.
1. Problems of definition
When speaking of particles in a general way, we have good reasons to avoid a too restrictive definition. Instead, we will enumerate some denominations in German, French, and English. They roughly circumscribe the range of the words that this article will be about and they will already reveal to a certain degree what the authors think they are good for.[2] The particles that I am going to treat are called in German:
Abtönungspartikeln, Modalpartikeln, Satzpartikeln, Gliederungssignale, illokutive Partikeln, diskursorientierende Partikeln, Einstellungspartikeln, diskursive Partikeln, Gesprächswörter.
In French:
modalisateurs, particules expressives, appréciatifs, argumentatifs, particules illocutoires, adverbes de phrase, connecteurs, mots de la communication, charnières du discours (de discours), particules énonciatives, marqueurs, adverbes explétifs.
In English:
pragmatic markers, discourse particles (as in this volume), discourse markers, interpersonal markers, argumentative markers, presentative particles, parentheticality markers, modal particles, adverbial connectives, connectives, modal discourse particles, elusive particles, particles of truth, contrastive and set-evoking particles, sentence-structure particles, down toners.
Some general remarks concerning the definition of particles:
In principle, I consider the category particle to be a cross-linguistic one. Contrary to widespread ideas (Sasse (1993:682): “These subcategories are too language-specific to justify cross-linguistic treatment”), particle is a category and has as such universal validity, just like other linguistic terms such as verb and noun. When defining noun we do not define the French noun or the Japanese one, but we have an idea of noun and, in a second step, we look at a certain language, observing if there is a noun and if so, what qualities it has (does it inflect, does it mark the plural, does it bear articles, etc.) The same holds for particles.[3] By particle I understand a word class. That means that only single words, not clauses, are considered to be particles. Word groups like I mean, you know, après tout, au fond, au total, c'est-à-dire, tout compte fait, je dirai que, sp. por este motivo, port. de maneira que, are not particles, in spite of the undisputed fact that they can occupy the place of a particle, replace it and be replaced by it. An analogy may help to point out what I mean, and justify my claim. If linguists speak of nouns, they only mean nouns and not elements which can stand in the place of a noun. So, that you come, is not a noun, even though it can stand for one. In the sentence I know the answer, the answer can be replaced by that you come, or by it. Neither that you come nor it, however, is nouns. A constitutive feature, however, for the definition of particles is that they do have (synsemantic) meaning. Nonetheless they do not refer to sections of the extralinguistic reality (they have no lexical meaning), nor do they position anything relative to the ego, the speaking person (they have no deictic meaning), and they do not have word class meaning (as pronouns do, which are the empty forms of nouns, adjectives or adverbs). Interjections, having no synsemantic meanings, are not particles.
To sum up, particles are (single) words, which have no dissecting (lexical), deictic nor word class meaning, but they do have a semantic content which they deploy in connection with other elements of the utterance (for further details see Hentschel and Weydt (1989: 6)).
2. Functions: Why we use Abtönungspartikeln.
I recall the results of an experiment presented in the preface of the Kleine deutsche Partikellehre (Weydt et al. 1983: chapter 0, 11–12). Two dialogues, held between two young people, were presented to our informants. The first, dialogue A, contained a relatively large number of Abtönungspartikeln. The second one, dialogue B, was identical to A except that all particles had been removed from it. It is still grammatically correct. A teacher could not find any grammatical mistakes.
Here is a section of this dialogue:
[...]X: Ja, das gibt's doch gar nicht! Was machst Du denn hier! Ich denk' Du bist in England!
Y: War ich auch, aber jetzt wohn' ich in Berlin. Bin gerade auf dem Rückweg.
X: Ist ja toll, ich fahr' nämlich auch nach Berlin, aber nur übers Wochenende.
Y: Gut, dann können wir ja während der Fahrt ein bißchen über die alten Zeiten quatschen.
X: Ja eben, aber sag' mal, wo fährt denn der 9.30 Uhr-Zug eigentlich ab?
[...] / [...]
X: Ja, das gibt's gar nicht! Was machst du hier? Ich denk' Du bist in England!
Y: War ich auch, aber jetzt wohn' ich in Berlin. Bin gerade auf dem Rückweg.
X: Ist toll, ich fahr nämlich auch nach Berlin, aber nur übers Wochenende.
Y: Gut, dann können wir während der Fahrt ein bißchen über die alten Zeiten quatschen.
X: Ja, aber sag', wo fährt der 9.30 Uhr-Zug ab?
[...]
Both dialogues were presented to informants who were asked to read them and judge them relative to a given matrix which contained the features natural, rejecting, warm, wooden, smooth, authentic, difficult to make contact with, friendly.
The results are shown in figure 1.
[4]
Fig. 1: Comparison of dialogues: Average results of 82 German native speakers
We have repeated the experiment often, with native German speakers as well as with non-native speakers of German, and every time the results were very similar. The differences in values assigned to the dialogues A and B must be explained by the difference in the presence or absence of particles.
How should this be interpreted? One can see that the matrix contains two different qualities. The first is a complex value, which may be labeled ‘authenticity’. It answers the question Do Germans really speak like this? The respective values are: natürlich ('natural'), flüssig ('smooth'), echt ('authentic'). The answer for dialogue A is Yes. In such a situation, they do speak with and not without particles. Dialogue A is much more authentic than dialogue B.
The second value is a social one and shows up in the other features. It can be labeled ‘friendliness’. Compared to B, dialogue A is conceived of as friendly and warm, neither rejecting nor stiff, nor unsociable.
A conclusion that could be drawn and a first answer to the title question could then be that the speakers use particles in their speech when and because they want to be friendly, and if they don't use them, their particleless speech is strange. (It will be the task of this article to ask whether this is an acceptable statement).
However, this conclusion leads to a number of difficulties. The first is the phenomenon of over-summativity. The overall impact of particles does not coincide with the meaning of only one of them. Neither eigentlich nor doch, nor denn nor any of the other particles are friendly in and of themselves. If one does not want to give up this first conclusion, then one would have to try seriously to explain how particles which are not friendly bring about friendliness. The second problem is that while particles may have friendly effects, they frequently do not. They can appear in utterances meant to hurt the partner. Was hast Du denn jetzt schon wieder gemacht?! (What did you do this time?!) and Haben sie überhaupt einen Führerschein? (Do you even have a driver's license?) can be very aggressive.
3. The semantica of modal particles
In order to find out how particles act in speech and to answer the title question of ‘what Abtönungspartikeln are good for’ it is useful to observe how the meanings of the particles function and how they act in conversation.
3.1. Six general theses on particle meaning
1. Every particle has a meaning. It is present in every occurrence.
This thesis opposes the idea that particles are meaningless, at least in certain contexts (mots de remplissage, vides/explétifs, palabras vacías), or as a weaker claim, semantically reduced (bleached), just fulfilling expletive functions. In this view, particles have lost their semantic content and are only used in their context for euphonic reasons. If this statement is not just based on a terminological difference (that meaning is only used for 'lexical meaning'), then we must disagree with it. We know of no case, where a particle is used without its meaning, and we don’t think that one can be found.
2. It is not the function of particles to tone down the utterance in oral discourse.
This claim corrects a frequent idea about particles, above all on German Abtönungspartikeln. For example James (1983), who calls eigentlich "one of the voluntary markers of imprecision". Similarly, Grevisse (1993: § 920) describes the function of particles like bien, donc, un peu, voir as ‘explétifs’: "Ils servent seulement à renforcer ou à atténuer l’expression. Certains participent aussi à la fonction phatique." It is very commonly said that particles fulfill the function of ‘down toners’[5] and that they are used in a general way and without having a specific meaning, in order to make the utterance in which they occur imprecise and vague. This in turn is said to be one way a speaker can take the sharpness from utterances, in order to prevent a so called FTA (face threatening act), or at least to make it less threatening. In reality, however, eigentlich and the other Abtönungspartikeln do not express weakening (or extenuation), but they have a precise meaning which is not extenuating. Eigentlich indicates that the utterance is true in a deeper sense. This holds for every single occurrence. This meaning does not in itself contain any extenuating, down-toning element. And no particle is in and of itself friendly (see 3.2). As we have seen in the earlier discussion, it is true that Abtönungspartikeln (and comparable elements in other languages) can make dialogues friendly, social, and natural, but not via down-toning. Particles show that the actual speaker takes into account his partner’s perspective on the subject, that he cooperates. This is why his speech is conceived as amiable. This effect can be achieved by various means and in any linguistic society. For more details see Hentschel and Weydt (1983), Weydt et al. (1983), and Weydt (forthcoming).
3. Particles, even if used as ‘Gliederungssignale’ (discourse markers?), conserve their primary meaning.
The term Gliederungssignal was created by Gülich (1970). It referred to particles (such as French et, alors, mais, puis, enfin) in the wider sense which take on specific functions in spoken dialogues or in spoken speech. In Gülich’s conception, Gliederungssignale form a homogeoneous word class in the grammar of spoken language, as opposed to traditional grammar, which, she writes, represents above all the system of the written language. In the grammar of the written, but not of the spoken language, the particles belong to different word classes. Among the Gliederungssignale one finds syntagms consisting of more than one traditional word, like vous savez, n’est-ce pas, tu comprends, et bien, you know, I mean which we have already excluded form our definition of particles and one word Gliederungssignale as for instance et, alors, mais, puis, quoi, hein, enfin.
A widespread opinion says that it is their task, to structure the dialogue (Gülich 1970: 270) and to help the hearer interpret the other’s turn. When these words are Gliederungssignale, they lose their original meaning. Mais, when used as Gliederungssignal (or, more exactly, as an opening-up signal, ‘Eröffnungssignal’), no longer expresses, following Gülich´s contrast, puis and alors do not contain temporal relationships (Gülich 1970: 297). We disagree with this theory. In deference to the space it would require to argue against it in detail, let it suffice to say briefly that that we could not find any example where a particle is a Gliederungssignal, instead of conserving its original meaning. There is no alternative of Gliederungssignal or particle with original (primary) meaning. Instead, a certain particle can fulfill the function of a Gliederungssignal because of the fact that it maintains its original meaning. It is able to structure the dialogue, as it means something. Let’s take again the example of the French conjunction mais. According to Gülich (1970: 77), (the same holds true for English but, German aber and probably for Dutch maar), used as Gliederungssignal no longer carries any adversative meaning. ”...hat es seine ursprüngliche lexikalische Bedeutung in vielen Fällen aufgegeben zugunsten seiner Eröffnungsfunktion”. If its only function were to open up a turn, it could be replaced, without changing the context conditions, by any other opening up signal. This, however, is not the case. Mais can only occur in cases which are compatible with its original, constant meaning. It demands a context which fits its meaning, and that explains why we can predict the context conditions for every occurrence.