[halshs-01076016] Shared knowledge and epistemic reductionism Covert semantics of German Modal Particles

The contribution advocates the use of the category of covertness in the semantic description of grammatical items After a short presentation of the two different kinds of covertness we distinguish resp epistemological and structural covertness it is shown that resorting to this notion makes it possible to propose a monosemic account of apparently polysemic signifiants The two examples discussed here are the German modal particles 'ja' yes and 'wohl' well both of which are related to commitment and Theory of Mind While ja is often said to be either a marker of consensus between speech act participants or an exclamative marker we demonstrate the existence of a unique meaning which can become covert depending on the illocutionary type of the sentence Then we prove that wohl is a strong commitment marker involved in covert evidential patterns Thus we can reduce the so-called weak commitment value of 'wohl' to an external interpretative bias



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