The Emergence and Development of the Danish Modal Particle Paradigm

Abstract
This dissertation investigates the development of the main Danish modal particles jo, sgu, skam, nu, da, vel, nok and vist. In Modern Danish, these particles express contextualization instructions, that is, they express how the utterance relates to the interactive context. In addition to this common content core, they also share several expression features: they cannot be placed in the pre-field, they occupy the left-most adverbial position in the middle field, they are obligatorily stressless, and they cannot constitute an answer alone. Finally, the modal particles are structured in subparadigms whose members share a common semantic core and have the same topological position relative to other modal particles.
The aim of this dissertation is to trace the development of these modal particles. When do the modal particles emerge, what meanings constitute their source meanings, and how can the transitions to the new meanings be explained? In addition to this, I examine how the semantic changes correlate with topological changes and with grammaticalization. Furthermore, I investigate the emergence of the modal particle paradigm as a whole and present a mechanism for the paradigmatic integration of new modal particles. I argue that already existing modal particles facilitate the emergence of new modal particles based on analogy. This contributes to their semantic and formal alignment resulting in the emergence of the paradigmatic structure.
My analysis of the development of the modal particles primarily follows a qualitative approach: I identify contexts that indicate the conventional status of new meanings by ruling out older meanings or meanings already reckoned with. Additionally, I reconstruct the meaning of the modal particle etymons based on information from historical dictionaries, translations and language comparison.
The results of the dissertation indicate that jo is the oldest modal particle, which begins to occur in the 16th century. This modal particle emerges based on a temporal meaning ‘always’ in argumentative bridging contexts as well as language contact with Middle Low German and Early New High German as a case of contact-induced grammaticalization. I argue that this modal particle constitutes the proto-modal particle, and that it facilitates the emergence of other modal particles by analogy. For the remaining modal particles, similar argumentative bridging contexts can be identified, and language contact appears to play a role a recurring role.
I argue that the development of the Danish modal particles can only be understood in an analysis that combines the perspective of the individual modal particle with that of the emerging paradigm as a whole.