Discourse Particles, Discourse Relations and Information Structure: The Case of <i>Nämlich</i>

Th e paper presents an analysis of the meaning and discourse eff ects of the German discourse particle nämlich that unifi es its diff erent readings and explains its distributional properties. I suggest that nämlich is most adequately analysed in terms of it indicating a specifi cational relation between its host and the preceding sentence, which in a question-based framework can be implemented as indicating an answer to a “specifying question”, a discourse question requiring an answer that provides a more detailed description of some aspect of the preceding utterance. Th e analysis represents a refi nement and extension of the question-based analysis of nämlich developed in Onea and Volodina (2009) where nämlich is analysed in terms of indicating that its host is a short answer to an implicit constituent question or a Why -discourse question. Th e approach I provide suggests solutions to several puzzles related to the distributional properties of nämlich .