The German discourse particles 'JA' and 'ruhig'

Abstract

This paper examines the German discourse particles JA and ruhig. Both particles are licensed in imperatives but yield different readings (command-like with JA vs. permission/concession with ruhig). Outside imperatives, they occur with priority modals, but not with epistemic/reportative modals. JA occurs productively in want (more rarely, hope) complements and rationale clauses, whereas ruhig is degraded there but occurs with weak necessity modals and in complements of attitudes reporting directives. I argue against a purely force-sensitive modal-modifier analysis and propose that both particles are propositional modifiers anchored to a bouletic event (speech act, attitude, or modal), carrying specific use conditions: JA requires that the attitude holder takes ¬???? to have below-threshold expected utility; ruhig requires a salient perspective according to which ¬???? may be required, together with attitude-holder indifference between ???? and ¬????. The account explains the core distribution, predicts the rarity of ruhig in canonical want/hope complements and standard rationale clauses, and cautions against using these particles as force diagnostics.