Shared knowledge and epistemic reductionism : Covert semantics of German Modal Particles

International audienceThe contribution advocates the use of the category of covertness in the semantic description of grammatical items. After a short presentation of the two different kinds of covertness we distinguish (resp. epistemological and structural covertness), it is shown that resorting to this notion makes it possible to propose a monosemic account of apparently polysemic signifiants. The two examples discussed here are the German modal particles 'ja' ("yes") and 'wohl' ("well"), both of which are related to commitment and Theory of Mind. While ja is often said to be either a marker of consensus between speech act participants or an exclamative marker, we demonstrate the existence of a unique meaning, which can become covert depending on the illocutionary type of the sentence. Then, we prove that wohl is a strong commitment marker involved in covert evidential patterns. Thus, we can reduce the so-called "weak commitment" value of 'wohl' to an external interpretative bias