Lice in the fur of our language? German irrelevance particles between Dutch and English

The present paper compares the distribution of English ‑ever, German immer and/or auch, and Dutch (dan) ook in universal concessive-conditional and nonspecific free relative subordinate clauses (e.g. G. Was auch immer du willst ‘Whatever you want’) and in their elliptically reduced versions (e.g. D. … of wat dan ook ‘… or whatever’). By combining large language-specific corpora such as the DeReKo, SoNaR, and BYU corpora with the smaller multilingual Conver‑ GENTiecorpus, 38,748 instances were obtained while maintaining comparability. Whereas present-day English has only one option in both clau... Mehr ...