Diskursmarkierung multidimensional: Perspektiven eines Forschungsprojekts zum Deutschen, Italienischen und Englischen

In the following paper we aim to present our project about discourse particles in German, Italianand English. Particles (“Abtönungspartikeln”) like “den”, “ja”, “eben” are often used in German to remark the attitude of the speaker/writer. Similar particles are not present in the same way in Italian and in English. We suppose that the attitude of the speaker is expressed through other ways, which relate to cultural and social factors. These ways do not only imply verbal expressions but also nonverbal elements like gestures and facial expressions, which have not been considered in previous studies about “Abtönungspartikeln”. It is evident that multidimensional analysis can improve research about particles. Moreover, monographs and articles about “Abtönungspartikeln” consider a couple of languages like German-Spanish, German-Italian, German-French etc. but not groups of languages. Our paper is divided into two main sections. The first section gives a brief description of the theoretical basis of our research, the reasons to investigate the subject of discourse-marking elements and the corpus. The second section focuses on our main theses: 1. Contrastive linguistics has to analyse groups of languages; 2. Discourse-marking is a communicative-oriented subject, which requires the consideration of various dimensions and not only of the linguistic dimension.