Re-approach to Modal Particles in the German Language and Other Discoveries

Acquiring a language after the critical age stage is not an easy task. It could involve complicated personal or social-cultural issues. The challenges might be more salient for individuals to acquire languages with lower phonological and orthographical similarity or larger linguistic distance from one’s mother language (Floccia et al., 2018) concerning the cognate facilitation effect. For instance, it appears to be easier to learn Mandarin as a second language (L2) or foreign language (Ln) for L1 Cantonese speakers due to their form similarity. In comparison, it could be more complicated for them to learn English regarding the lack of cognate translation equivalents (TEs). Speaking of TEs, they are commonly employed in the language learning process for understanding lexical meanings. Learners would make use of the dictionary meanings as the fundamental recognition of words. However, some words could convey complex meanings concerning linguistic, pragmatic, syntactic and cultural contexts, which L2 and Ln speakers usually have difficulties acquiring. Modal particles are one of the widely discussed examples. There could also be a problem of circularity in dictionaries. Thus, a comprehensive understanding of semantic and pragmatic implications is often required to fully understand and communicate the utterances.

Modal particles (MPs) (German: Modalpartikeln/Abtönungspartikeln) are defined as uninflected grammatical particles, usually used in spoken language, also known as filler words. They indicate how the sentence’s content relates to the mutual knowledge in communication, and they add mood to the sentence’s meaning. Their usages in everyday language are often indicated as the standard features of the German speech community. Spoken speech might sound ‘weird’ and ‘non-native’ without MPs. In German, main group of modal particles primarily consist of the following (Winters, 2013): aber, auch, bloß, denn, doch, eben, eigentlich, etwa, halt, ja, (ein)mal, nur, schon, vielleicht and wohl.

To shed light on the uniqueness of MPs, one of the most commonly applied examples, doch, is manually selected for in-depth analysis in pragmatic and semantic aspects. According to the Collins German dictionary (n.d.), doch has the literal meanings of the conjunction ‘but’, the adverbs ‘after all’, ‘really’, ‘but then’, ‘anyway’, question tags ‘isn’t it?’ or ‘haven’t you?’ and other untranslatable definitions. The translation equivalents of doch in English would be further discussed in the section below. Another feature worth to be noticed is that it is possible to combine MPs with other MPs. For instance, doch can link to other MPs to form ja doch, wenn doch, doch mal and doch gleich (Müller, 2018). The lexical meanings could then be modified.

Pragmatic meanings of doch vary along with its contexts. MPs are linked to pragmatic contexts as well as information structure. As a result, understanding their function only via sentence-oriented grammar is nearly impossible (Stückmeier, 2014). Hence, five scenarios were provided below for better understanding and further elaborations (Abraham, 1991; Bross, 2012; Hartmann, 1986):

1. Affirmation of a negative question

A and B are classmates. A met B sitting on a bench on the way to school.

A:        Gehst du nicht zur Schule?

*Go you not to school?

(Don’t you go to school?)

B:        Doch! Natürlich gehe ich!

*Doch! Of course go I!

(Yes! Of course, I go!)

Note: (*): ungrammatical

In the above scenario, doch is B’s positive answer to A’s negative question, representing ‘yes’ in response to the query and meaning that B goes to school. For declarative sentences with negation, a different form of reply is obligatory. Doch is used instead of ja (yes) to convey affirmation. It does not exist in the utterance as a filler word. Thus, doch is not acting as a modal particle in this case.

• Emphasis on a contrast between the speaker’s request and a possible objection to this request by the hearer

The hearer enters the interview room.

Nehmen Sie doch Platz!

*Take You doch seat!

(Do have a seat!)

            Due to politeness and cultural conventions, the interviewee might not instantly sit after entering the room or without greeting the interviewer. Thus, the interviewer would invite him/her to take a seat by using an imperative sentence. In this setting, the MP doch implies that the interviewer has affirmed the hearer’s greeting and is requesting him/her to sit down in order to begin the interview. Also, the speaker emphasized the action of the hearer taking a seat via doch.

• Expression of doubt

The speaker and the hearer are going to join a party in the evening.

Du kommst doch heute Abend?

*You come doch this evening?

(You are coming this evening, aren’t you?)

            In the above final-rise declarative sentence, the speaker doubts whether the hearer would come to the party that evening, so he/she is asking to reconfirm the hearer’s desire or willingness to attain. The role of MP in the utterance is similar to the interrogative fragment or question tag in English, anticipating that the speaker is requesting confirmation of the assertion ‘Du kommst heute Abend’ (You are coming this evening) instead of posting a polar question (yes-no question).

• Expression of positive evaluation as contrary to a previously expressed or assumed negative evaluation

A and B are new classmates. B asked A about his/her language learning process.

A:        Ich habe die Sprache nur ein Jahr gelernt.

            *I have the language only one year learnt.

            (I have learnt the language only for one year.)

B:        Aber du sprichst doch wirklich gut!

*But you speak doch really well!

(But you speak really well!)

In the conversation, A expresses a negative view of his/her language ability by utilizing the word nur (only), implying that he/she thinks the time ein Jahr (one year) is not enough to be competent. B’s reply is, however, positive, as he/she used both aber (but) and the MP doch to indicate that B is in the opposite view from the hearer. The speaker evaluates the hearer’s language competence as positive, supported by the following positive words in the utterance wirklich gut (really good).

• Emphasis on a contrast between the utterance and actions or conventions

The speaker just finished telling the hearer what he/she saw yesterday on the train.

Du hörst doch mir zu?

*You hear doch me?

(You hear me, right?)

The MP doch is used since the speaker thinks that the hearer has not paid attention to something, especially what the speaker said. The hearer should conventionally be listening and paying attention, yet he/she might not be. Thus, his/her act is contrary to what the speaker suggests in the assertion ‘Du hörst mir zu’ (you hear me/you listen to me).

The main functions of MPs are to express the speaker’s attitude towards the utterance or the hearer and to clarify an utterance by recapping some of its meaning (Hentschel & Weydt, 2002; Weydt, 1969). MPs may refer to information conveyed by words, information deduced from the situation in which the discourse occurs or prior knowledge. Both forms of references are not mutually exclusive but can coexist. As a result, MPs bind the sentence contents in which they appear to what was said or what the discourse condition indicates. Hence, Hentschel (1986) described MPs as metacommunicative deictics. It recognizes the distinction between primary meaning and pragmatic effects such as social behaviours, politeness. For instance, Weydt (2003) pointed out that MPs denn, doch, eigentlich and ja do not contain the semantic meaning of friendliness but are perceived as friendly. Similar usage is also shown above in the fourth scenario.

Along with the growing popularity of pragmatics and the broader application of speech act theory, the illocutionary role of modal particles is constantly debated among scholars due to its controversy. Dissenting arguments hint that MPs are not restricted to one particular type of speech act, so it could not be generalized about the effects of MPs on one of them (Weydt, 2001). The illocutionary force of an utterance is not reliant on MPs, as the illocution would be equivalent even if the MPs are eliminated. This point leads to further provocative debates between semantic minimalists and semantic maximalists on whether MPs contain semantic meanings. Also, semantic categories of MPs do not match those of speech acts, given that the illocutionary effect of MPs does not function on the level of their lexical meaning (Hentschel & Weydt, 2002). Response to these statements mainly suggested that MPs factually modify or explicit the illocutionary force of speech acts with implications for the style of an utterance (Winters, 2013), which could be hinted from the semantic meanings of MPs with implicature (IM). One of the illustrations provided by Winters (2013) is the use of an adversative doch in an apology.

Tut mir leid, ich hab’s doch nicht so gemeint.

*Sorry, I have it doch not that meant.

(Sorry, I didn’t mean it.)

There is an implication behind the apology in the above utterance, indicating that the speaker is still sorry, although both the speaker and the hearer know that the hearer thinks the speaker meant it. Doch could exhibit an expressive and assertive force in this context.

As mentioned above, translation equivalents of MPs in other languages could be assistance in understanding their meanings. Most importantly, it is crucial to translate the MPs in different texts accurately into the target languages. The English language offers various ways, incorporating multiple linguistic features, to express a speaker’s attitude, such as question tags, the emphatic ‘do’, epistemic adverbs (certainly, perhaps, probably), epistemic verbs (I think, I suppose) and the adverb ‘just’ (Winters, 2013). Some of them are also comprised in the given examples. As for the Chinese language, the translation process could be perceived as more complex, as German and Chinese are distant linguistically. The two languages have fewer cognate TEs than German and English. Hsu (2009) conducted a corpus-based study investigating the Chinese translations of German MPs, showing that only 41.3% of the MPs occurring were translated. Chinese word class with similar functions as MPs is mainly modal auxiliary or auxiliary words of moods (語氣助詞). The commonly used ones in Mandarin Chinese are 的(de), 了(le), 嗎(mā), 吧(ba), 啊(ā) and 呢(nē). As in Cantonese, examples include 㗎(gaa3), 啊(aa1), 喇(laa3), 囉(lo1), 喎(wo3), 啦(laa1) and 咋(zaa3). The following excerpts illustrate how the MP doch could be translated into Mandarin (Hsu, 2009) and Cantonese, respectively:

Mandarin:

So sagt doch schon was!

*所以說些什麼!

((妳們)倒是快說啊！)

The speaker is urging and requesting the hearer to talk something through an imperative sentence. The usage of the MP doch is similar to the second scenario above, highlighting the contrast between the speaker’s request and a possible objection by the hearer. The translation 啊 could also convey the speaker’s emphasis on his/her request.

Cantonese:

Seid doch ruhig!

*係安靜!

(靜啲啦!)

In this imperative sentence, the speaker is requesting the hearer to keep quiet. The utterance implies that the speaker seems impatient by using the MP doch, similar to the fifth scenario above, in which the speaker questions the hearer’s attention. As the auxiliary word 啦 also conveys a meaning of command and request in the target language, the translation is appropriate and conventional.

In consolidation, modal particles are indispensable particles in the everyday communication of various languages, yet preliminary research has been done to establish broadly and in-depth on this topic, especially in a contemporary social context. Along with the debates between semantic minimalism and maximalism, more corpus-based studies should be done on recognizing the semantic meaning, pragmatic meaning and speech act referred to the modal particles. Their correlation with other particles, such as focus particles and intensifiers, could also be another focus of further investigations.

References

Abraham, W. (1991). Discourse Particles: Descriptive and theoretical investigations on the logical, syntactic and pragmatic properties of discourse particles in German. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Bross, F. (2012). German modal particles and the common ground. Helikon. A Multidisciplinary Online Journal, 2, 182-209.

Collins German Dictionary. (n.d.). Doch. In Collins German Dictionary. Retrieved February 20, 2021, from https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/german-english/doch

Doherty, M. (1985). Epistemische Bedeutung [Epistemic Meaning]. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag.

Floccia, C., Sambrook, T. D., Delle Luche, C., Kwok, R., Goslin, J., White, L., Cattani, A., Sullivan, E., Abbot-Smith, K., Krott, A., Mills, D., Rowland, C., Gervain, J., Plunkett, K., Hoff, E., Core, C., & Patricia, J. (2018). Vocabulary of 2-year-olds learning English and an additional language: Norms and effects of linguistic distance. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 83(1), 7-29.

Hartmann, D. (1986). Context analysis or analysis of sentence meaning?: On modal particles in German, Journal of Pragmatics, 10(5), 543-557.

Hentschel, E. & Weydt, H. (2002). Die Wortart ‘Partikel’ [The word type ‘particle’]. In D.A. Cruse, F. Hundsnurscher, M. Job, & P.R. Lutzeier (Eds.), Lexikologie (Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft 21.1) [Lexicology (Handbook of Linguistics and Communication Studies] (pp. 646-653). Berlin & New York: de Gruyter.

Hsu, A. N. (2009). Modalpartikeln als Übersetzungsproblem Die deutschen Modalpartikeln Doch, ja, mal und Ihre Funktionalen Äquivalente im Chinesischen [Modal particles as a translation problem The German modal particles doch, ja, mal and their functional equivalents in Chinese]. Deutsch-taiwanische Hefte, 17, 123-140.

Müller, S. (2018). Distribution und Interpretation von Modalpartikel-Kombinationen [Distribution and Interpretation of combinations of modal particles]. Berlin: Language Science Press.

Stückmeier, V. (2014). Ja doch wohl C? Modal Particles in German as C-related elements, Studia Linguistica, 68(1), 16-48.

Weydt, H. (2001). Partikelforschung [Research on Particles]. In H. Holtus, M. Metzeltin & C. Schmitt (Eds.), Lexikon der Romanistischen Linguistik [Lexicon of romantic linguistics] (Vol. 1) (pp. 782-801). Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.

Weydt, H. (2003). Nachts schlafen die Ratten doch - Os ratos dormem de noite. Partikeln in der literarischen Übersetzung [The rats sleep at night after al. Particles in literary translation]. In H. Blühdorn & J. Schmidt-Radefeldt (Eds.), Die kleineren Wortarten im Sprachvergleich Deutsch-Portugiesisch [The smaller parts of speech in the language comparison between German and Portuguese] (Rostocker Romanistische Arbeiten 7) (pp. 243-257). Frankfurt/M: Peter Lang.

Winters, M. (2013). German modal particles – from lice in the fur of our language to manifestations of translators’ styles, Studies in Translation Theory and Practice, 21(3),427-445.