Why doubling discourse particles?

Abstract

In this chapter, I want to extend my earlier work on discourse particles as functional heads by providing new evidence from particle doubling. I will argue that the German data on doubling that I will present are explained in a natural way within the unificational theory of focus particles as well as discourse particles developed in Bayer (1996, 1999, 2012, 2018) and in Bayer and Obenauer (2011), Bayer and Trotzke (2015) as well as in Bayer, Häussler and Bader (2016). Particle doubling lends new support to this theory which defends the view that particles of the relevant sort are functional heads.