15. On sentential particles: A crosslinguistic study
Francesca Gobbo, Nicola Munaro, Cecilia Poletto · 2015
In this work we investigate the distribution of sentential particles in two very different linguistic areas, i.e. the Northern Italian area and Mandarin Chinese, with the aim to show that particles do not form a unitary class, as some of them do not have a sentence typing function. Furthermore, non-sentence typing particles can be split into different groups with respect to the syntactic properties they display. In the languages we consider sentence-final and sentence-initial particles belong to the same syntactic class, while sentence-internal particles display different syntactic properties. We provide a formal syntactic account of the link between sentence-initial and sentence-final particles in terms of syntactic movement of the whole clause in front of the sentence-initial particle, which, after the movement of the clause, ends up being spelled out in sentence-final position.