Schedule 73. StuTS

German has a range of modal particles, uninflected words that do not have a rich meaning in themselves but instead act as metalingual expressions that indicate to the hearer the mood or attitude of the speaker towards a proposition (Bross 2012). Their precise meanings are therefore complex to model, and since few languages feature such a class of words, their translation is often difficult (Schoonjans 2021). The meanings of modal particles halt and eben are often discussed together, and the two particles often considered to have a similar meaning (e.g. Thurmair 1989, Bross 2012). Both refer to common knowledge of speaker and listener, and Bross (2012) also argues that both convey an attitude of resignation (e.g. es ist halt so). Torres Cajo (2019) however, argues that the two particles have distinct meanings, with halt being used for establishing proximal coherence, referring to common knowledge, and information management, whilst eben is used for establishing distal coherence, marking evidence, emphasis, and for argumentative functions.
In this talk I present work Emilia Strom, Kristin Zarbock, Emily Harris and I did, investigating Torres Cajo’s thesis that halt and eben have distinct meanings/functions. We conducted a corpus study of English translations of both particles in the European Parliament Proceedings Parallel Corpus 1996-2011. We found that the two particles were translated differently into English, providing additional evidence for their having distinct meanings. In particular, the function of halt in referring to (supposed) common knowledge and the functions of eben in marking evidence, emphasis and argumentation were evident in many of the English translations.

Bross, Fabian (2012). German modal particles and the common ground. Helikon. A Multidisciplinary Online Journal.
Thurmair, Maria (1989). Modalpartikeln und ihre Kombination, Bd. 223 in Linguistische Arbeiten. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.
Schoonjans, Steven (2021). Schwierige Wörtchen leicht übersetzt! Modalpartikeln und sinnverwandte Ausdrücke im Englischen, Niederländischen und Französischen. Wien: Böhlau.
Torres Cajo, Sarah (2019). Zwischen Strukturierung, Wissensmanagement und Argumentation im Gespräch – Interaktionale Verwendungsweisen der Modalpartikeln halt und eben im gesprochenen Deutsch. Deutsche Sprache 47 (4).

Info

Day: 2023-05-28
Start time: 16:10
Duration: 00:30
Room: IG 0.251
Track: Corpus Linguistics

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