Minima Modalia

For a CV with a full publication list, look here (in French): CV PYM

Comprehensive CV with full publication list in English: HERE; in German: HERE.

This webpage is devoted to my research on grammatical semantics, which is mainly focused on the fonctional categories and high adverbial functions in German and, more and more, in other Germanic languages.

Core topics of my research include:

  • Functional categories of particles (of three kinds: modal particles, discourse particles and focus particles) and high adverbs (« sentence adverbs », modal adverbs, viewpoint adverbs, connectives, adverbial discourse markers)
  • Heterosemy and grammaticalization
  • The hierarchical structure of the clause, from a functional multi-layer perspective that is essentially inspired by Functional Grammar, but open to insights from the Cartographic Approach.
  • Re-reading the classics of illocutionary semantics

This webpage is essentially a repository for papers in German, English and French dealing with those four dimensions of my work. A fifth important dimension, which is common to all aspects of my research, is my concern with Information Structure as a major semantic and syntactic domain in the grammatical architecture of Germanic languages. For a more extensive and theoretically-informed presentation, you can have a look at my habilitation memoir, a 130-pages-long synthesis of my work between 2011 and 2021.

All these topics show up in my PhD thesis (defended Oct. 2016), which you can download here from the institutional TEL repository (/!\ in French). You can read a summary here (also in French).

My habilitation thesis (defended Nov. 2021) was devoted to the cross-Germanic comparison of the pair subject / predicate, and on the cross-linguistic validity of subject criteria applied to Germanic languages since the late 16th century. You can read a summary of it here: https://minimamodalia.files.wordpress.com/2022/08/summary_subjects.pdf

I regularly publish stuff on other issues in Germanic philology that are less connected to this projet. There is a special webpage for this second group of publications HERE.