Gibt es überhaupt einen König von Frankreich? Zur Semantik von überhaupt in Fragen und anderen Kontexten

Abstract

The German particle überhaupt is characterised by several usage types which exhibit different prosodic and semantic properties and which are restricted to specific sentence types only. In this paper, I will investigate the denotation of überhaupt in questions and I will show that the occurrence of the particle in questions obeys two fundamental use conditions: (i) the questioned proposition p must not be asserted by one of the discourse participants prior to the utterance containing überhaupt, and (ii), the questioned proposition p has to be d-linked to the discourse context. Due to condition (ii), questions containing überhaupt cannot be used discourse-initially and it follows from condition (i) that questioning with überhaupt can be used to distinguish asserted from non-asserted meanings. Furthermore, I will argue that all usage types of überhaupt can be traced back to one fundamental meaning component: The particle leads to an abstraction of a proposition p to a set of propositions including p. In questions, this set is synonymous with the amount of alternatives established by the question; in assertions with überhaupt, the speaker communicates that he believes the relevant set of propositions to be true; and in orders containing überhaupt, the hearer is requested to update his plan set with the resulting set of propositions.