Abstract

This article combines the old problem of the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic analysis of discourse particles with recent approaches to the syntax and semantics of the left periphery. Based on semantic and cross-linguistic evidence, the German particle wohl ,presumably' is analysed as a syntactic and semantic modifier of sentence-type indicators (declarative, interrogative). lt is shown that wohl does not contribute to the descriptive, propositional content of an utterance. Nor does it trigger an implicature. The proposed analysis captures the peculiar semantic behaviour of wohl by assuming that it moves to SpecForceP at LF. From there it operates on (the meaning of) sentence type operators, which are located in the Force-head (Rizzi 1997). The semantic modification with wohl results in a weaker commitment to the proposition expressed in declaratives and in a request for a weaker commitment conceming the questioned proposition in interrogatives. In both cases, the presence of wohl indicates that the commitment is not absolute, but rather speculative in nature (Green 2000). Further evidence for a left-peripheral position of wohl (at LF) comes from other languages where the counterparts of wohl occur in the clausal periphery overtly. The analysis proposed allows for a compositional derivation of the expressive meaning of wohl. In doing so, it sheds more light on the semantic properties of the left periphery, in particular of the functional projection ForceP.