Two Sides of the Same Pragmatic Move : The German Discourse Particles

The German words nicht and etwa can be used in two very different ways. Under one use, nicht semantically resembles the clausal negation marker not in English, while the word etwa is close in meaning to the adverb approximately. In this use, nicht and etwa affect the truth-conditions of the sentence, just as their English equivalents. But nicht and etwa can also be truth-conditionally inert without any straightforward counterparts in English. In this latter use, they affect the discourse conditions instead by behaving like discourse particles, as already noticed in descriptive grammars (e.g. Thurmair 1989). Our main goal in this paper is to present arguments supporting the discourse particle use of nicht and etwa and highlighting the content of their pragmatic contribution. In particular, we argue for the novel claim that nicht and etwa are closely related pragmatically. They mark the two sides of the same pragmatic move by imposing very similar discourse conditions concerning the speaker’s belief in a complementary way (Sec. 2). We conclude by sketching a preliminary account of the pragmatic behavior of nicht and etwa within Gunlogson’s (2008) framework for discourse structure (Sec. 3).