Conditional antecedents containing the German discourse particle denn: a corpus study

TLDR: In this paper, the authors discuss the semantic contribution and distribution of conditional antecedents containing the discourse particle denn, abbreviated as AWD, and propose that AWDs occur only in contexts where the speaker does not believe the antecedent proposition p to hold and the truth of p has been nonexplicitly (= tacitly) proposed.

Abstract: We discuss the semantic contribution and distribution of conditional antecedents containing the discourse particle denn (“antecedents with denn”, abbreviated as AWD). We propose that AWDs occur only in contexts where (i) the speaker does not believe the antecedent proposition p to hold, and (ii) the truth of p has been nonexplicitly (= tacitly) proposed. To gain a better understanding of (ii), we conduct two corpus studies. The first study investigates the relative location of AWDs with respect to their consequents. We find that unlike antecedents of regular hypothetical conditionals, AWDs occur significantly more often after the material in the consequent and parenthetically inside this material than before it. In a second study, we investigate the position of the tacit proposal relative to the AWD. We find that it typically precedes the AWD. Both results are in accordance with (ii). We then present a classification of the types of tacit proposals that we find with AWDs: speakers use AWDs to qualify their own statements or to doubt proposals of others, in both cases managing potential updates to the common ground.

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SarahZobel UDK 811.112.2'367'37
University of Tübingen
*
DOI: 10.4312/linguistica.56.1.345-361
EvaCsipak
University of Konstanz
**
CONDITIONAL ANTECEDENTS CONTAINING THE GERMAN
DISCOURSE PARTICLE DENN: A CORPUS STUDY
***
1. INTRODUCTION
The German expression denn has various functions, for example, as a sentence con-
nector, as a comparative particle, and notably as a discourse particle. The literature on
discourse particle denn nearly exclusively discusses its use in questions (see Thurmair
1989, 1991; Bayer 2012, i. a.). In this paper, we take a look at a second, understudied
use of discourse particle denn, as in (1), which occurs in the antecedent of a condi-
tional (henceforth: conditional denn; see Brauße 1994; Kwon 2005; Coniglio 2011;
Häussler 2015).
(1) [Context: A asks B which activities are planned for the next day.]
B: Wir gehen schwimmen, wenn es denn warm genug ist.
we go swimming if it
denn warm enough is
B: ‘We’ll go swimming, if it is
denn warm enough.’
By using conditional denn, B signals that she is uncertain, even skeptic, that it will
be warm enough to go swimming the next day. Hence, denn intuitively strengthens the
pragmatic inference connected to the antecedent
1
that the speaker does not believe that
the proposition denoted by the antecedent (i.e., the “antecedent proposition”) holds.
The aim of this paper is to present two corpus studies that shed light on one of the
conditions of use of conditional denn by exploring the behavior of antecedents contain-
ing denn (henceforth: AWD), and to discuss a classi󰱲cation of the corpus data based on
observations from the studies.
* sarah.zobel@ds.uni-tuebingen.de
** eva.csipak@uni-konstanz.de
*** We thank Edith Scheifell for bringing the use of the particle denn in conditionals to our attention.
We also thank Andrea Beltrama, María Biezma, Ryan Bochnak, Kai von Fintel, Viola Schmitt,
Frank Sode, Yvonne Viesel, Thomas Weskott, and the audiences at CSSP 2015, SinFonIJA 8,
Questions in Discourse 7, and María Biezma's course “Pragmatics 3” (Konstanz, Summer 2016)
for helpful discussion. We also thank an anonymous reviewer for comments on the manuscript. All
mistakes are our own.
1 For the sake of brevity, whenever we use the term “antecedent”, we mean conditional antecedents.

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The paper is structured as follows. We brie󰱳y present the existing literature on
conditional denn and introduce our own account of conditional denn’s conditions of
use and semantic contribution in Section 2. In Section 3, we present the results of our
corpus studies on the behavior of AWDs and discuss their implications. The classi󰱲ca-
tion of the corpus data is presented in Section 4. Section 5 concludes.
2. ASEMANTIC/PRAGMATICANALYSISOFCONDITIONALDENN
2.1 TheFunctionofDiscourseParticlesandPreviousAnalysesofConditional
denn
The function of discourse particles is to 󰱲t the current utterance to the ongoing dis-
course (Zimmermann 2011). That is, they convey speaker attitudes or additional infor-
mation on the content of that utterance. In this sense, they are “discourse navigating de-
vices” (see McCready 2006; Eckardt 2013; Rojas-Esponda 2014) that are utilized by the
speaker to make explicit certain parts of the discourse, for instance, the make-up of the
current “common ground” (= the beliefs the speaker and her addressee share as a result
of their conversation, Stalnaker 1973). It is commonly assumed that formally, discourse
particles contribute “not-at-issue content”, that is, content that is not part of the truth
conditions of the sentence that contains the particles (see Simons et al. 2011; Potts 2015).
As we have stated in the introduction, conditional denn is understudied compared
to denn in questions.
2
In the literature, conditional denn is discussed in Brauße 1994,
Kwon 2005, Coniglio 2011, and Häussler 2015. Di󰱱ering in the details, these authors
agree that conditional denn seems to signal the speaker’s uncertainty or doubt about
the truth of the antecedent proposition. While intuitively appealing, this leaves open
the question as to how the contribution of denn di󰱱ers from and interacts with the
inference connected to the antecedent that the speaker is not committed to the truth of
the antecedent in the actual world. Our proposal, which we give below, is completely
explicit regarding this point.
2.2 ANewAnalysisofConditionaldenn
Below, we summarize our own analysis of the conditions of use and the semantic con-
tribution of conditional denn. For reasons of space, we cannot fully motivate and discuss
our analysis; for details, we refer the interested reader to Csipak and Zobel (to appear).
The three parts of our proposal in (2)-(4) are based on our native speaker intuitions
regarding constructed examples and a sample of naturally occurring data taken from the
ZEIT corpus from the online platform “Digitales Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache”
(“Digital Dictionary of the German Language”, DWDS).
2 Discourse particle denn in questions has been discussed quite extensively while conditional denn
has been mostly overlooked. This is not surprising given the relative frequency of the two uses:
compared to denn in questions, conditional denn is rare; the latter use makes up only about 3-5%
of all particle uses. This estimate is based on a random sample of 200 tokens of denn exported
from the corpus of Spoken German (“Gesprochene Sprache”, ~2.5 million tokens) that is part of
the DWDS platform (export: Jan. 30, 2016). For reasons of space, the details of this study cannot
be presented.

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The 󰱲rst condition of use for conditional denn given in (2) captures that denn can
only be used if the speaker is uncommitted to the truth of the proposition p that denn
comments on.
(2) Condition 1
The speaker does not believe that p is true in the actual world w
0
, that is, he is
uncommitted to the truth of p in w
0
.
Antecedents of hypothetical conditionals ful󰱲ll this condition while antecedents of
temporal and factual conditionals do not (see Fabricius-Hansen and Sæbø 1983; von
Fintel 2011). Above, we observed that conditional denn makes explicit the speaker’s
uncertainty regarding the antecedent proposition p for the antecedent in which it oc-
curs. When is a speaker prompted to express uncertainty or doubt with respect to a
proposition p? For example, when there is evidence in the discourse context that some-
one acts as if p were true, but the truth of p is not supported by the speaker’s knowledge
about the actual world. Condition 2 restricts the use of denn to a subtype of this kind of
context: the proposition p on which denn comments must have been tacitly proposed.
3
(3) Condition 2
The proposition p is tacitly proposed or can reasonably be inferred to be tacitly
proposed by a participant α, where p is a necessary precondition for the validity
of the content of a previous utterance by α (or a part of that utterance).
4
Any non-explicitly conveyed content quali󰱲es as a tacit proposal. The term “neces-
sary precondition” is not meant in a logical sense; it includes presuppositions, as well
as premises of defeasible inferences based on world knowledge. In sum, the concept
of “tacitly proposed necessary precondition” is a generalization of the notion of pre-
supposed new information. This is information that the speaker asks the addressee to
accommodate before regular discourse updates can be performed (see von Fintel 2008).
Lastly, we assume that the not-at-issue content contributed by the particle interacts
with the pragmatic inference accompanying the use of a hypothetical conditional: the
speaker is uncommitted to the truth of the antecedent proposition p in w
0
(as required by
Condition 1). By adding denn, the speaker signals that she is not only uncommitted to the
truth of p, but in fact judges p as so improbable that she would not be willing to assert it.
(4) Not-at-issue content contributed by denn.
[[denn]]
c
(p): prob(c
S
, w
0
, p) < T,
where T is the threshold for assertability
In prose: The probability assigned by the speaker c
S
to whether p is true in w
0
is less than a pragmatic assertability threshold T.
3 Condition 2 also excludes denn from occurring in factual conditionals.
4 Note that α can also be the speaker.

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Example (5) illustrates the entire proposal.
(5) [Context: Speaker A discusses his 󰱲rst visit to his 󰱲ancé’s brother with a friend.]
A: Sein Auto habe ich nicht gesehen, wenn er denn eines hat.
his car have I not seen if he
denn one has
A: ‘I didn’t see his car, if he
denn has one.’
Condition 1 is met because denn occurs in the antecedent of a hypothetical condi-
tional. Condition 2 is also met. The de󰱲nite description sein Auto (Engl. ‘his car’) in
the consequent presupposes that A’s 󰱲ancé’s brother has a car (= p). Since it is A’s
󰱲rst visit to the brother’s house, the presupposed content p is plausibly not part of the
common ground. Hence, by using the de󰱲nite description, A makes the tacit proposal
to update the common ground with ‘He has a car’. Lastly, the use of conditional denn
signals that speaker A is uncertain/skeptic that his 󰱲ancé’s brother has a car, and that he
is, hence, unwilling to assert or to presuppose p.
While Condition 1 captures a precise property of conditional denn, the exact nature
of Condition 2 raises more questions. To gain a clearer empirical picture, we conducted
two corpus studies to investigate whether there is evidence for the presence of a preced-
ing tacit proposal. The results are presented in Section 3.
3. CORPUS STUDIES ON CONDITION 2
3.1 Study1
3.1.1 Operationalization
The obvious problem with 󰱲nding an adequate operationalization for pragmatic con-
cepts like “presence of a tacit proposal” is how to translate them into categories that can
be reliably and potentially automatically checked for in a sample of corpus data. The
operationalization that we use in our 󰱲rst study is “position of the antecedent relative
to its consequent”. While the items cannot be tagged automatically for this property,
reliable annotation criteria can be given easily.
The motivation for this choice is the following observation: If a speaker uses AWDs
to express uncertainty with respect to a tacit proposal made by her interlocutor, our
intuition is that she preferably uses a bare antecedent. In contrast, if the speaker uses an
AWD to self-qualify her own statements, she preferably uses a full conditional where
the tacit proposal occurs in the consequent.
(6) Exploratory hypothesis 1
Antecedents containing denn in full conditionals occur more frequently follow-
ing an overt consequent than preceding it.
5
5 The conditions of use for discourse particles are not strict rules (cf. Zimmermann 2011: 2027).
Hence, we can only expect to 󰱲nd the predicted patterns regarding Condition 2 in the majority of
cases.

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3.1.2 ChoiceofCorpusandQuery
We chose the ZEIT corpus available at the DWDS platform. ZEIT is a corpus of jour-
nalistic texts (~225.8 mio. tokens, 2015) taken from the German weekly newspaper
DIE ZEIT, which among traditional articles also contains transcribed interviews (i.e.,
texts in written language that is close to spoken language), which arguably increases
the possibility of encountering discourse particles. To speci󰱲cally target AWDs, we
used the query in (7).
(7)
(“wenn #7 denn”) || (“@falls #7 denn”) && !(“\, denn”) && !(“\; denn”) && !(“\: denn”)
The query includes denn following the conditional subjunctors wenn or falls, and
excludes the occurrences of denn introducing an independent clause.
6
The query (May
3, 2015) yielded 4,411 results which were all exported. From this sub-corpus, we ran-
domly picked a sample of 300 items, which were 󰱲ltered manually for false hits and
problematic items.
7
The 󰱲nal number of corpus items that were annotated was 260.
3.1.3 DetailsRegardingtheAnnotation
To annotate the relative position of the antecedent, we used the two 󰱲eld categories
“Vorfeld” and “Nachfeld” of the classical Topological Field Model (see Höhle 1986):
the “Vorfeld” contains the linguistic material before the 󰱲nite verb in German main
clauses; the “Nachfeld” contains the material after the non-󰱲nite verbal material in
main clauses and all verbal material in embedded clauses. In addition to these catego-
ries, we used the levels “bare” for bare antecedents and “parenthetical” for antecedents
that are inserted parenthetically after the Vorfeld constituent or as part of the main
body of the sentence (= the “Mittelfeld”).
8
The latter level was not planned initially, but
proved to be necessary during the annotation process.
9
(8) POSITION OF ANTECEDENT (4 levels)
bare (9a), Vorfeld (9b), parenthetical (9c), Nachfeld (9d)
(9) a) Wenn sie das denn angegeben und ö󰠃entlich zugänglich gemacht haben.
if they that
denn speci󰱲ed and publicly accessible made have
‘If they
denn speci󰱲ed it, and made it publicly accessible.’*
b) Wenn’s denn so polar zugehen sollte, dann ziehe ich die USA vor.
if-it
denn so polar be-like-this should then prefer I the USA prt
‘If we are denn supposed to have a strict opinion, then I prefer the US.’*
6 The conjunction denn expresses a causal link between the two conjuncts.
7 Items were classi󰱲ed as problematic if they were fragments, or if it was impossible for us to make
sense of the content.
8 In the Nachfeld, AWDs that are semantically embedded and parenthetical AWDs were not dis-
tinguished. For the purpose of this study, the distinction is not crucial.
9 Examples that were taken from the corpus sample (possibly with slight editing) are marked by *
after the translation.