A Pragmatic Analysis of Norwegian Modal Particles (Sil International and the University of Texas at Arlington Publications in Linguistics, Vol.113)

The focus of this volume is a small class of uninflectabe lexical items which occur postverbally, cannot take stress, and have no inherent lexcal-semantic meaning, but function as expressions of emotive modality, similar to intonation and gestures in English.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

1. The Norwegian Modal Particles

1.1 Description in traditional grammars
1.2 Stressed near-homophones
1.3 Delimiting modal particles in Norwegian
1.4 Regional variety considerations
1.5 Historical features

2. Review of the Literature

2.1 German particle research
2.2 Other modal particle research

3. Theoretical Framework

3.1 Grice's theory of implicature
3.2 Speech act theory
3.3 Conversation analysis
3.4 Data corpus

4. A Functional Analysis of jo and nå

4.1 Jo
4.2 Nå

5. Discussion and Conclusions

5.1 Modal particles versus sentence adverbials
5.2 Jo and nå: A comparative analysis
5.3 Interaction as manipulation
5.4 Implications

References