Modal particles

In this chapter, we discuss evidence supporting the claim that Romance lan- guages exhibit a special class of modal particles (MPs), whose existence has traditionally been regarded as typical of German and Germanic languages. After describing the key properties distinguishing MPs from similar word classes, such as modal adverbs and discourse markers, we provide an overview of the elements that have been considered MPs in the Romance languages in previous research. We show that, while the elements which have grammaticalised into MPs appear to build a relatively stable class across the Romance languages, they exhibit a different syntactic distribution across varieties. Specifically, Italian and French MPs can, among other this, also be syntactically integrated in the sentence, whereas this key property is not found for Ibero-Romance and Romanian potential MPs. Therefore, the existence of MPs appears to be uncontroversial for French and Italian, whereas it is still a matter of debate for Ibero-Romance and Romanian.