Workshop at the Annual Meeting of the German Society of Linguistics (DGfS 2027), 02.-05. March 2027, Jena

Call for Abstracts

Newer results on modal particles (MPs) show that they have a large variety of functions that go beyond their Common Ground-managing function in an utterance (Repp, 2013). MPs have been shown to interact with gestural information (Schoonjans, 2018), Perspectivization (Klages, 2020; Hüge, 2025), and coherence relations (Döring & Repp, 2019; Seemann, 2025). Their contribution of not at-issue meaning has been argued to impose additional use-conditions and processing costs (Hinterwimmer & Ebert, 2018; Axel-Tober et al., 2024; Czypionka et al., 2025). At the same time, there are open questions regarding the links between these various observed functions and how they affect processing of utterances containing a modal particle.

Harnessing state-of-the-art semantic and pragmatic theory in combination with current computational modeling techniques and sophisticated experimental methods allows us to use MPs as a lens on the interactions between all the mentioned dimensions at the heart of rich discourse phenomena. 

We invite the contribution of abstracts on theoretical and empirical questions related to MPs (20 minutes talk + 10 minutes discussion). Potential questions to be discussed include, but are not limited to: 

• How does the ‘meaning’ of MPs interact with their observed functions in discourse?
• Which of their functions are part of their core meaning, and which are epiphenomena emerging from interactions with other aspects?
• Are the functions observed for MPs stable across languages?
• Which methods are suitable for monitoring MP meaning and processing? 

Submission

Abstracts should be anonymous and max. one A4 page (regular font size) plus one additional page for references and figures. Please submit a PDF file to: dgfs2027-particlesspam prevention@sfb1718.uni-tuebingen.de 

• Deadline for submission: 20. August 2026
• Notification: 10. September 2026
• Workshop: 02.-05. March 2027

Please note that according to the conference guidelines, the first author is only allowed to present at one workshop.

Invited Speakers

• Anna Czypionka (University of Konstanz)
• Marco Coniglio (University of Göttingen)

Organizers

Hannah Seemann, Jennifer Hüge, Fabian Schlotterbeck
SFB 1718 “Common Ground”, University of Tübingen

Selected References

• Axel-Tober, K. Schlotterbeck, F. & Stolterfoht, B. (2024). Common-Ground Management: Polyfunctional Particles in Processing and Diachronic Development. Poster presented at XPrag.it, Venice. https://osf.io/jnarz
• Czypionka, A., Reimer, L., Kharaman, M., & Eulitz, C. (2025). Processing at-issue and non-at-issue content: Evoked and induced brain activities reveal early and long-lasting differences. PLOS One, 20(5), Article e0321953. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0321953
• Döring, S., & Repp, S. (2019). The modal particles ja and doch and their interaction with discourse structure: Corpus and experimental evidence. In S. Featherston, R. Hörnig, S. V. Wietersheim, & S. Winkler (Eds.), Experiments in Focus: Information Structure and Semantic Processing (Vol. 571, pp. 17–56). De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110623093-002
• Hinterwimmer, S., & Ebert, C. (2018). A comparison of ‘fei’ and ‘aber’. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung, 22(1), 469–486. https://doi.org/10.18148/sub/2018.v22.101
• Hüge, J. (2025). Die Diskurspartikeln “ja” und “doch” als sprachliche Hinweise für einen Free Indirect Discourse. [Unpublished master thesis, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen].  
• Klages, J. (2020). Perspektivierung im Text—Interpretation und Verarbeitung [Doctoral dissertation, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen]. https://doi.org/10.53846/goediss-8038
• Repp, S. (2013). Common Ground Management: Modal particles, Illocutionary Negation and VERUM. In D. Gutzmann & H. Gärtner (Eds.), Beyond Expressives: Explorations in Use-Conditional Meaning (pp. 231–274). Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004183988
• Schoonjans, S. (2018). Modalpartikeln als multimodale Konstruktionen: Eine korpusbasierte Kookkurrenzanalyse von Modalpartikeln und Gestik im Deutschen. De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/zrs-2021-2062
• Seemann, H. (2025). The Signaling Function of Modal Particles in Discourse [Doctoral dissertation, Ruhr-Universität Bochum]. Universitätsbibliothek Ruhr-Universität Bochum https://doi.org/10.13154/294-13433