Eintrag

Titel

Ein Zweifelsfall: zweifeln im Deutschen

Personen

Markus Fischer

Jahr

2003

Typ

Aufsatz

Verlag

Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS)

Ort

Berlin

Seiten

1 - 40

In

Questions and Focus

Schlagwörter

Fokus
Semantik

Abstract

Two main types of sentences are traditionally distinguished in the context of semantic theories of questions and answers: declarative sentences, corresponding to statements, and interrogative sentences, corresponding to questions. The interrogative forms can be further subdivided into dialectical ones (yes-no-questions) and non-dialectical ones (constituent questions). These distinctions are made for both root and embedded sentences. The predicates that select sentential complements fall into three classes: predicates that license only declaratives, those that allow only for interrogatives, and those that embed both types of sentences. In this connection, verbs of doubt are interesting in that they allow for declaratives as well as dialectical interrogatives, while non-dialectical interrogatives do not seem to be appropriate complements. In what follows, our main concern will be with the Gennan verb of doubt zweifeln and its possible sentential complements. Speaker intuitions as to which constructions are grammatical or acceptable vary, particularly with respect to rare expressions like zweifeln. Interviews and corpus analysis were therefore applied as a means to acquire reliable linguistic data. These as well as data from historical sources and from some languages other than Gennan (esp. English and Italian) are presented and analysed. In the last section, based on the notion of subjective probability, an attempt is made at explaining the observations.

https://grammis.ids-mannheim.de/bdg/33982