What is it about?
Contrary to Italian and many other languages, German has a linguistic means to mark the speaker’s stance: the so-called modal particles, such as WOHL, EBEN and JA. This paper analyses their complex meaning arising from the intertwined relations between speaker – hearer – state of affairs as the three key entities of stance they mark and the textual or situational context, concluding that they have only covert epistemic and evidential features. This cross-linguistic analysis proves that it is impossible not only to translate them, but also to draw a clear borderline between epistemicity and evidentiality.
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Why is it important?
This paper describes the pragmatic meaning of WOHL, EBEN and JA, compensating the lack of a lexical meaning.
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This page is a summary of: The translatability into Italian of the German stance marking modal particles wohl, eben and ja, Belgian Journal of Linguistics, December 2015, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/bjl.29.06wee.
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