Modal Particles in German: New Directions in Modeling Their Combinatorial Behavior via Quantitative Analysis

Abstract Research on German modal particles (MPs) has long noted their tendency to occur in combination with one another. Prior studies have investigated this phenomenon relying mostly on qualitative and introspective methods. The present article demonstrates the benefits of employing quantitative methods to investigate MP combinations. In a corpus-linguistic study of spoken German, we address the question of ordering tendencies within these sequences, as well as the question of co-occurrence, that is, which MPs exhibit a tendency to combine with which others. Based on the results obtained we point out how longstanding questions on MP combinations may profit from the quantitative methods employed.*