Abstract
Spoken language, especially spoken German, is rich in particles thatdo not contribute to the propositional content of utterances, but playimportant roles in steering the flow of the dialogue and inconveying various attitudes and expectations of the speaker. Languagesdiffer widely in their conventions on particle usage, and thereforethese words pose significant problems for translation. As a solution,we propose an inventory of “discourse functions” that characterizethe pragmatic impact of particles. These functions are to be assignedto particles in the analysis phase, so that the translation step canuse the abstract information to decide on the best way of renderingthe same effect in the target-language utterance.
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Stede, M., Schmitz, B. Discourse Particles and Discourse Functions. Machine Translation 15, 125–147 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1011112031877
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1011112031877