41 In proceedings of Northwest Linguistics Conference 29, University of British Columbia Working Papers in Linguistics 38, Zoe Lam and Natalie Weber (eds.), 2014. Bavarian discourse particles- at the syntax pragmatics interface Sonja Thoma University of British Columbia Abstract: Discourse particles are said to express speaker attitude (Weydt 1969, among many others). Discourse particles in Miesbach Bavarian can be shown to have not only speaker, but also addressee orientation. This orientation is reflected in syntax, i.e. in the ordering restrictions that can be observed. The main point I argue for in this paper, however, is that discourse particles are not optional, modificational elements, as claimed in the literature (Zimmermann 2011 and references therein), but are obligatory, once context is taken into consideration. When the proposition has to connect to a discourse context, this connection (GROUNDING) happens via the left peripheral projection GroundP, comprised of GroundSpeakerP and GroundAddresseeP (cf. Speas & Tenny 2003). 1 Introduction Miesbach Bavarian 1 is rich in modal, or pragmatic particles, aka discourse particles (DPRTs). DPRTs, as the name suggests, are predominantly a spoken language, discourse phenomenon. DPRTs are used by interlocutors for common ground management (Krifka 2008). That is, they are not truth conditional elements, or enrich a proposition with lexical meaning (Weydt 1969; Zimmermann 2011, among many others); their main function is to allow utterances to be GROUNDED in the context, by establishing an appropriate transition between the proposition and the context (cf. Davis 2011; Karagjosova 2011). This will be shown in detail this paper. DPRTs appear void of autosemantic, lexical content, a characteristic that makes them notoriously hard to translate. I argue here that DPRTs do have a core semantic meaning. This meaning, however, is not lexically accessible, but rather, the DPRT core meaning SPECIFIES the way the proposition connects to the context, via speaker or addressee. Each is represented in a syntactic projection, GroundSpeakerP (GroundSP) and GroundAddresseeP (GroundAP) respectively. Almost all DPRTs in Miesbach Bavarian have lexical counterparts, i.e they are polyfunctional. The non DPRT functions can be manifold, and range from focus sensitive (bloß ‘only, bare’), temporal (jetz ‘now’), to conjunctional (denn ‘because’). Cross-linguistically, DPRTs are thought to associate with the C layer of the clause, since they are peripheral elements in many languages (e.g. Japanese, Davis 2011; Cantonese, Lam 2013, etc). The C layer is assumed to encode discourse level information (Rizzi 1997). Miesbach Bavarian DPRTs, although fulfilling the same discourse function as peripheral DPRTs do in other languages, do not appear overtly in the C domain. They are syntactically integrated, which means they appear after the finite verb in Cº. Yet despite the low syntactic position, Bavarian DPRTs scope over the proposition. One other, often cited criterion for DPRTs is their optionality (e.g. Weydt 1969; Thurmair 1989; Zimmermann 2004, 2011). That is, DPRTs are not considered “grammatical” elements, in the sense that they constitute obligatory syntactic building blocks. They are generally viewed as optional, modificational elements. This is illustrated in the following; 1 All data come from the author’s field work on the Middle Bavarian dialect spoken south of Munich, in the Miesbach county. The claims made in this paper are valid for this dialect, but I strongly suspect that they are transferrable to other German varieties as well. This is an empirical issue, however, and will have to be verified.