Introduction [to the special issue on particles]

INTRODUCTION

Ad Foolen and Ton van der Wouden
University of Nijmegen Utrecht University

If one performs a computerized literature search on the string ‘particle’, one will be partly lost in physics and comparable fields. The linguistic results of the search will fall apart in two types of reference: on the one hand studies that have to do with verbal particles, as they occur in cover up and cool down, and on the other hand with those particles that are of interest to those who participated in the conference entitled ‘Discourse particles, modal and focal particles and all that stuff …’, which was held in Brussels, December 8 and 9, 2000, and on which the present volume is based. With the rather long and open-ended title of the conference, the organizers wanted to indicate that ‘our’ particles come in different sorts and that it is still unclear which and how many types should be distinguished.

The awareness that there are words that are ‘different’ in the sense that they do not fit in standard word class systems seems to have been present for more than two millennia. Dionysios Thrax devoted the last section of his Teknè Grammatikè (around 100 B.C.) to the ‘sundesmoi’, and the last type of the 8 subtypes that he distinguishes is reserved for the ‘parapleromatikoi’, the really difficult particles (cf. Kärnä (2000)). Taking into consideration that Dionysios started his treatment of the parts of speech with the noun, we could say that already at that time grammatical descriptions started with the accessible and ended with the least accessible part of the language, ‘accessible’ in the sense of descriptive accessibility.

This is not the place to recapitulate the whole history of particle research. If we restrict ourselves to recent history, Denniston’s 1934 monumental study of the Greek particles deserves being mentioned first. It brought together the detailed knowledge that Graecists had built up in the course of a long tradition, which was continued, since Denniston, into the present time, cf. Rijksbaron (ed.) (1997).

Second in line come the early studies on German modal particles by Krivonosov (1963) and Weydt (1969). The latter also played a stimulating role as an organizer of a series of conferences, which took in place in Berlin from 1977 onwards (cf. Weydt (ed.) 1979 and later volumes). These conferences functioned as discussion platforms for papers on different types of particles in German and other languages.

In the 1980s particle research really got steam. The new fields of Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis stimulated the study of conversational interaction, a form of language use in which particles are most frequent. Against this empirical background, particle research arose in different theoretical frameworks: Argumentation theory (cf. Ducrot et al. (1980)); the

Genevan Model as developed by Roulet and others (cf. the papers in the Cahiers de Linguistique Française, which appeared from 1980 onwards); Discourse Analysis (Schiffrin 1987); Relevance Theory (Blakemore 1987).
In the 1990s, particle research became an accepted field of linguistic research, witness the regular stream of papers in journals like the Journal of Pragmatics, and in several volumes in the Pragmatics & Beyond Series (Jucker & Ziv (eds.) 1998, Andersen & Fretheim, (eds.) 2000). The need of overviews was fulfilled by books like König (1990) and Fernandez (1994), as well as by papers such as Fraser (1999), Foolen (1996), Lenk (1997), Schiffrin (2001), Schourup (1999), and Weydt (2001). Monographs like Kroon (1995) and Mosegaard Hansen (1998) also contained useful introductory chapters. These overviews did not, however, lead to a unified framework that suited all researchers theoretically and methodologically. But in this respect, particle research is not that different from other branches of linguistic research.

In the mean time, descriptive results of particle research started to find their way into reference grammars, dictionaries and foreign language teaching materials. To give only two examples: In its first, 1984, edition, the Reference Grammar of Dutch, the $A N S$, did not differentiate between different types of particles. In the revised edition of 1997, however, a distinction was made between focus particles and modal particles (see ANS, part I, p. 456). And in the $9^{\text {th }}$ edition of Hermann Paul’s German Dictionary, special attention was paid to the semantic history of particles (cf. Burkhardt 1994: 132). Future editions of existing synchronic dictionaries can profit from the specialized ‘particle dictionaries’ that resulted, in recent years, from particle research, for example the four volume German-French dictionary of particles by Métrich et al. (1996-2002).

What are the theoretical issues that particle researchers, the authors in this volume in particular, still struggle with these days? In the first place, there is the old and ever present problem of the bewildering polyfunctionality of particles. One and the same form is often used as a focus particle, a modal particle and a discourse particle, and uses that contribute to the propositional content of sentences can often be distinguished at the same time as well. The question then is, how to deal with this problem in a descriptively adequate way. Part of the theoretical diversification in the field is caused by the position one takes on this issue. Let us have a look at the Cusco Quechua enclitic $-m i$, as discussed by Faller in this volume. This form has both evidential (indicating ‘source of information’) and validational (‘degree of certainty’) uses. In earlier analyses, authors argued in favour of reducing one of the two uses to the other. Indeed, the ‘seduction’ of the one form - one meaning view (the ‘minimalist’ description) has been very strong in particle research: one of the uses is the coded one, the other(s) is/are contextually derived, or, as a descriptive alternative, all the uses go back to one abstract coded meaning, the uses being contextual enrichments of that abstract input. But the picture that arises from most of the papers in the present volume is one in which the different uses are coded meanings, related to each other in a polysemic pattern. The context of use determines which of the meanings is actualized. And the context might lead to more fine-grained usage distinctions that are to be handled at a

pragmatic level. To return to -mi in Quechua: in Faller’s view, both the evidential and the validational uses are coded meanings. In the same spirit, Kroon & Risselada, in their description of the Latin particle iam, characterize the different uses in terms of a semantic feature analysis. And, as the authors note, the Latin data give no reason to consider one of the usages as the primary one or the prototype.

The study of coded meanings of particles naturally leads to the question whether the coded meaning of a particle takes part in a system of paradigmatic oppositions. Schwenter shows that the Spanish focus particles hasta and incluso, which have been considered as near-equivalents, reveal their difference if studied contrastively in the scalar system of Spanish additive focus particles. Similarly, Pusch contrasts Occitan que, $e$, and $\varnothing$, and Mosegaard Hansen analyzes the paradigm of déjà and encore, adding an interesting discussion concerning the question whether this paradigmatic ‘systematicity’ is a fundamental property of particles and other words, or whether we should see it as a ‘spontaneous order’ which emerges from language use.

Linguistic synchrony provides one perspective for analyzing the polyfunctionality of particles, but the rise of grammaticalization studies in the 1990s naturally led to taking the diachronic perspective as well. Particles develop from content words often (perhaps always, but that is a topic for further research), and once a particle has adopted a ‘procedural meaning’ (to use a term from Relevance Theory) the process easily leads to further, more subjectivized (in the sense of Traugott) procedural meanings. This perspective is central in the paper by Diana Lewis on English of course, and it also plays a considerable role in the papers by Mosegaard Hansen, and Pusch. Tsangalidis argues, however, that synchronic polysemy is not necessarily the result of grammaticalization: two items having similar form but going back to different diachronic sources may become associated synchronically in such a way that their meanings or functions become part of one polysemous network.

One strategy to tackle a particle’s elusive meaning is to take its conceptual meaning (assuming it has one) as point of departure. That is what Zwarts et al. do in their analysis of the Dutch particle eens, which is analyzed as a temporal and aspectual particle in the first place. Its occurrence in the contexts of the ‘reportive present’, the imperative and the infinitive (see their section 3.5.1) could be seen as non-propositional uses of this aspectual and temporal meaning.

The 11 papers in this volume are presented in alphabetical order. We considered grouping them in thematic sections, but different thematic orderings seemed equally relevant, so we decided to leave it to the reader to make his/her own groupings. A functional-categorial grouping would have resulted in a tripartition: one set of papers deals with particles which participate in the focus structure of the utterance: Hoeksema, Kroon & Riselada, McCoy, and Schwenter. Then there are the papers that concentrate on modal, attitudinal, meanings, where the relation between speaker and the proposition is at stake: Faller, Pusch, Tsangalidis, and van der Wouden. Finally, there are two papers in which the discourse-connective function is central: the paper by Lewis on of

course, and the second half of Mosegaard Hansen’s paper, starting with section 4.2, where the connective uses of encore and déjà are analyzed. Of course, as particles are polyfunctional, it is only natural that in most analyses in this volume the relation between the different functions is the central point of concern.

Another grouping could have been made depending on the kind of data that constitute the empirical basis of the analysis. Most papers in the volume use data taken from real texts or recorded discourse, but Tsangalidis’ paper shows that mainly using intuitive data is (still) a valid option. The three ‘Groningen’ papers (Hoeksema, van der Wouden, and Zwarts et al.) distinguish themselves by a quantitative approach. They apply quantitative tools to large corpora, both synchronic (van der Wouden) and diachronic (Hoeksema, and Zwarts et al.), which results in the discovery of collocational patterns and their change over time.

As was said before, particle research does not take place within one generally accepted theoretical framework. It is our conviction, however, that it would be worthwhile to put part of the future research effort into developing such a framework. Let us conclude this introduction with formulating some desiderata that such a framework should accommodate. In the first place the semiotic status of particles deserves theoretical reflection. Like pronouns and some adverbs, particles seem to function in an indexical way. Whether this is a defining, necessary characteristic of particles, is a question that needs further discussion. Secondly, it seems that the reference of a particle is always an aspect or dimension of the communicative context: existing or presumed assumptions of speaker and hearer, alternative values for aspects of the present proposition, aspects of the foregoing text, etc. The question is whether we can develop a model in which the relevant aspects of the communicative context are represented in an integrated way. Thirdly, the dimensions of the communicative context should be related in such a way that it becomes understandable that a particle that indicates a value on one dimension can easily be applied to a similar value on a different dimension, thus ‘explaining’ the type of diachronic ‘steps’ that seem so natural in the development of particle use and meaning.

An outsider could ask whether there is any reason to distinguish particle research as a separate branch of linguistic analysis. Not in principle, we would answer. But as the particles, discourse, modal, focal, and others, were very much in neglect when structuralist and generative ideas dominated the research agenda, the need was felt to start paying special attention to particles. As organizers of the Brussels conference, we felt that this special attention was still worthwhile at the turn of the millennium, and we took the strong interest in the conference as support for this judgment. At the same time, however, we hope that the insights resulting from particle research will in the long run be incorporated in general linguistic theorizing. Particle research will have reached its goal if there is no reason anymore to organize particle conferences such as the one that led to the present volume.

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Acknowledgements

The eleven articles in this volume constitute a selection from the papers that were given at the two-day conference ‘Discourse particles, modal and focal particles, and all that stuff …’, which took place on December 8 and 9, 2000 in Brussels. The conference was organized under the auspices of the Linguistic Society of Belgium.

The organizers would like to thank the colleagues and students of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) who took care for the local organization, and the Belgian and Dutch Science Foundation (FWO and NWO) for their financial support via the VNC programme.

We thank the more than 50 speakers who presented their papers during two days in 3 parallel sessions, together resulting in an inspiring exchange of ideas. As the space for publication in this issue of BJL was limited, we had to be very selective. We selected in particular those papers that not only contributed descriptive insights, but which also had a ‘message’, methodological or theoretical, which might inspire further research.

We are very thankful to the colleagues who helped us in the reviewing process: Felix Ameka, Alan Cienki, Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen, Jack Hoeksema, Eliza Kitis, Caroline Kroon, Ludo Melis, Pieter Muysken, Krista Ojutkangas, Rodie Risselada, Martine Robbeets, Scott Schwenter, Elizabeth Closs Traugott, Willy Vandeweghe, Jacqueline Visconti, Roel Vismans, and Sera De Vriendt.

We trust that the present volume provides a reliable impression of the issues that were discussed at the conference. In a broader sense, we hope that it reflects the state of the art in particle research at the turn of the millennium. And we hope that the volume will stimulate further research on particles that will undoubtedly go on in the new millennium.

Piet Van de Craen
Ad Foolen
Ton van der Wouden