Modal particles and sentence type restrictions: A construction grammar perspective

Abstract

The problem addressed in this study is the sentence type restrictions of modal particles. In the literature on modal particles, it is often noted that these items cannot occur freely in all kinds of sentence types, but are restricted to certain grammatical host structures. In this article, we first discuss previous work on the semantic, formal and functional factors that determine the usage of modal particles in different grammatical configurations. The results of this discussion show that a fine-grained representation on several different levels of both modal particles and their grammatical environments is necessary to account for the usage restrictions, which is why we turn to a construction grammatical description. In particular, we suggest that the sentence type restrictions of modal particles are the result of a complex interaction between the individual modal particle on the one hand and specific grammatical constructions on the other hand. In this paper, we focus on constructions of the kind encoding particular speech act orientations, namely sentence type constructions. We explore this interaction from a construction grammatical perspective.