DOI 10.1515/tlir.2011.013 © Walter de Gruyter Discourse particles, clause structure,

and question types1 Josef Bayer and Hans-GeorG oBenauer Discourse particles provide important clues to our understanding of the s yntax-to-discourse relation. They are sensitive to sentence types and utter-ance contexts. As such they seem to contribute to the determination of illocu-tionary force. After providing some general background information on dis-course particles, the present article focuses on the role of discourse particles in German constituent questions. Syntactic evidence is provided which s uggests that they are pre-VP functional heads which can to some extent be stacked. It is shown how the particles under consideration can access the force system, and how this access can proceed even in cases in which they occur in embed-ded clauses. After providing the basic architecture, we investigate the role of these particles in “special questions”, questions which are not interpreted as simple requests for information. The syntactic discussion is then extended to cases in which the discourse particle forms a constituent with a wh-phrase – [wh+Prt] – , as well as to cases in which this constituent interacts with parti-cles in pre-VP position. The [wh+Prt] construction offers important evidence both in favor of the head status of the particles under investigation and in favo