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Am Anfang war die Lücke
(2012)
This paper provides a unified semantic and discourse pragmatic analysis of the German particle nämlich, traditionally described as having a specificational and an explanative reading. Our claim is that nämlich is a discourse marker which signals that the expression it is attached to is a short (elliptic) answer to a salient implicit question about the previous utterance. We show how both the explanative and the specificational reading can be derived from this more general semantic contribution. In addition we discuss some cross linguistic consequences of our analysis.
Der Schein trügt nämlich
(2009)
The German particle nämlich is puzzling because it seems to have two independent semantic functions which strictly correlate with specific syntactic environments: if nämlich precedes an ,,orphan constituent" (Haegeman 1991) it specifies an underspecified discourse referent in the previous clause, and if nämlich appears in a whole clause its function is marking that the hostclause delivers an explanation to the previous clause. A polysemy- or even homonymy-analysis seems problematic precisely because of this strict correlation between syntactic environment and semantic function. In this paper we propose a unified analysis of nämlich. We argue that nämlich marks the property of the context that there is an implicit question to which the host of nämlich delivers a direct (short) answer (Jacobson 2008). Crucially, constituents are good short answers to constituent-questions (Who?), while whole clauses are only good short-answers to ,,sentence"-questions like Why p? Building on these intuitions we show how both readings of nämlich can systematically be derived and implement our analysis formally.