17 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 traditionallybeen regarded as typical of German and Germanic languages. After describing the keyproperties distinguishing MPs from similar word classes, such as modal adverbs and dis-course markers, we provide an overview of the elements that have been considered MPsin the Romance languages in previous research. We show that, while the elements whichhave grammaticalised into MPs appear to build a relatively stable class across theRomance languages, they exhibit a different syntactic distribution across varieties. Speci-fically, Italian and French MPs can, among other things, also be syntactically integrated inthe sentence, whereas this key property is not found for Ibero-Romance and Romanianpotential MPs.Therefore, the existence of MPs appears to be uncontroversial for Frenchand Italian, whereas it is still a matter of debate for Ibero-Romance and Romanian.