Rethinking, Understanding Modal particles (RUM)

Modal particles (MPs) are small words (such as Germ, "ja", in "Das ist ja klasse" 'this is ja great'; It. "mai" in non-temporal usages: "Cosa vorrà mai?" 'What does he want?') expressing the speaker’s attitude towards the proposition in a similar fashion to epistemic usages of modal verbs and speaker's oriented adverbs (such as "unfortunately", "frankly", high adverbs in Cinque 1999). MPs have long been considered to be a typical German phenomenon (Müller 2014) and the identification of this class of elements has mostly been confined to German linguistics. Comparative work is scarce and has mostly focused on written data (Waltereit 2001, Masi 1996, Katelhön 2008, Schoonjans 2021), or on elicited data from a single variety and on single potential MPs (Coniglio 2009, Cardinaletti 2011; Soffritti 2008 on "mica"). Whereas recent work by Schoonjans (2018) on German MPs as multimodal constructions has opened a new very promising line of research on the interaction between MPs, gestures, and prosody in face-to-face communication, no such work exists for Italian. The scarcity of comparative work in the area of MPs is reflected by the fact that, despite their centrality in the language, MPs have received only a partial treatment in most materials for the teaching of German as a foreign language (Pittner 2010, Thurmair 2021). The Rethinking, Understanding Modal particles project aims at filling in these gaps, i.e. i) the absence of comprehensive German/Italian comparative investigations; ii) the still poorly understood relationship between MPs, prosody, gestures in German and Italian and iii) the absence of effective learning materials for the study of MPs. In order to fill in these gaps, the project will first create two multimodal corpora of German and Italian MPs in which the occurrences of MPs are extracted from audio and video data and tagged with the following information: syntactic context, lexico-semantic aspects, type of communicative activity, multimodal and prosodic aspects. The collected data will be organized in dictionary entries in order to arrive at a comprehensive and fine-grained multimodal description of German and Italian MPs. The project will then investigate the relationship between MPs, prosody and gestures through comprehension and production psycholinguistic experiments using the facilities at BemboLab in Venice. The experiments will manipulate MP presence and prosody/gestures, specifically: the presence of an MP in the absence of prosody/gesture, prosody/gesture without the MP, and prosody/gesture with MP, in order to try to establish their role in determining the proposition's meaning. Finally, based on the collected data, the project will propose innovative didactic materials for the learning of MPs aiming at integrating the results of descriptive linguistics with those of the interactional analysis, in order to bridge the gap between the theory and the classroom.