Common ground management: Modal particles, illocutionary negation and verum
Sophie Repp · 2013
This paper argues that modal particles, illocutionary negation as expressed by the operator FALSUM, and the operator VERUM are common-ground managing operators, which indicate the status of a proposition relative to the common ground (newness, expectedness, speaker commitment etc.).Common-ground managing operators can influence the truthconditional meaning of a proposition.This is shown in detail for the scopal interaction of negation and epistemic modal verbs in German.The observed effects are argued to be due to (i) the negative marker denoting either propositional negation or the operator FALSUM, and (ii) common-ground managing operators determining to a large degree the discourse appropriateness of the utterance they occur in.