‘WH-ever’ in German, Dutch and English : a contrastive study showcasing the ConverGENTiecorpus

The present paper investigates the English irrelevance particle -ever and its functional equivalents immer/auch in German and (dan) ook in Dutch with regard to their distributional patterns and functional motivations, using data from the small-scale, multilingual, comparative ConverGENTiecorpus in conjunction with larger, non-comparable, monolingual corpora. An overview of the corpora, the search queries and the methods of analysis is provided first. The distributional and combinatorial patterns of irrelevance particles in two types of irrelevance constructions are presented, focusing on Dutch and German, and the present-day dynamics of irrelevance marking are discussed through the differences and similarities of the language-specific particles, including some peculiarities of the much less variable English WH-ever paradigm. A survey of the further grammaticalization of whatever and however and its German and Dutch equivalents is also provided. The results suggest that the synchronic state of the irrelevance-marking subsystems in English, German and Dutch represents snapshots of a long-term grammaticalization process. While this process is nearly complete in English, in German it is not only incomplete but appears to have lost its former directionality. Although signs of grammaticalization are weakest in Dutch W … ook, Dutch W dan ook shows the highest degree of specialization of all irrelevance-marking combinations in the set. English WH-ever is much less versatile, with two notable exceptions: the freestanding discourse marker whatever and the concessive/ contrastive conjunctional adverb and discourse marker however.

ISBN:9783110682397

Publication year:2020

Accessibility:Closed