Modalpartikeln in deutschen Fragesätzen und ihre Funktionsäquivalente im Italienischen

This paper aims at providing an overview of the main points of my doctoral project “Die deutschen Modalpartikeln in Fragesätzen und ihre Funktionsäquivalente im Italienischen“. The purpose of the project is to analyse the phenomenon of German modal particles occurring in interrogative sentences and their functional equivalents in Italian. Modal particles are a typical phenomenon of the German language, which rarely finds direct equivalents in other languages, especially in Romance languages. The contrastive analysis of modal particles occurrences in original German literary texts and their corresponding translations into Italian may be a good way to identify possible functional equivalents. After a brief introduction to the phenomenon in the two languages investigated here, German and Italian, this paper will describe the corpus-based analysis undertaken for this research project. The last section will illustrate some of the results based on the gathered data.