A modal account of syntactically non-integrated von wegen in contemporary German

Abstract

Abstract This study aims to account for the German expression von wegen (literally ‘of ways’) when used outside of the sentence structure. Drawing on corpus data for written and spoken German, we show that there are two types of syntactically non-integrated von wegen: (i) illustrating/exemplifying von wegen and, (ii) opposing von wegen. By combining both a formal and a functional perspective, we claim that these two types can be analyzed as modal expressions. In fact, from a formal point of view based on Werner Abraham’s classification in lexical and grammatical forms of modality, both illustrating/exemplifying and opposing von wegen encode a quotative/evidential meaning, whereas only the second type expresses an epistemic modal value. Nevertheless, von wegen does not belong to the prototypical forms of modality described by Abraham as it does not occupy a structural position within the sentence and therefore does not fall into any of the classes proposed by Abraham. For this reason, we also need to integrate the formal perspective with a functional one by defining modality not only structurally but also semantically. In doing so, we account for the modality of von wegen in that we assume the existence of a third strategy of modalization that is specific to syntactically non-integrated expressions and operates at the discourse level.