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I present an unitary analysis of the German adversative connectors aber and doch, based on Sæbø (2003), where the semantics of these connectors is defined in terms of a presupposition involving negation and topic alternatives. I argue that the meaning of aber and doch is underspecified between various types of contrast and that the type of contrast they indicate in particular context is determined by the configuration of topic alternatives at hand, which in turn is correlated with the particular syntactic and prosodic properties of the connectors in the concrete discourse as well as with the type of discourse (coordination, dialogue) in which the connectors are used. Finally, I sketch an underspecified semantic representation of the meaning of aber and doch and hint at a disambiguation algorithm that allows the bottom up construction of discourses with these connectors starting from their underspecified representation and employing information about their syntactic and prosodic properties as well as about the information structure and the discourse structure of the particular context in which they occur., Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung, Vol 12 (2008): Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 12

The paper presents an exploratory DRT-based account of the adversative connector doch. It is assumed that doch is weakly ambiguous between various relations of contrast, and an underspecified meaning is defined in the framework of UDRT Reyle et al. (2005). It is shown how in concrete discourse, a particular reading is selected from the underspecified meaning representation, depending on the information structure of the sentence, as well as on the syntactic and prosodic properties of the respective doch-use. This process is modelled in the framework of the most recent version of DRT Kamp et al. (2005) and the version of DRT that takes into consideration the focus-background division of the sentence Kamp (2004).

The paper investigates the origins of the German/Dutch particle toch/doch) in the hope of shedding light on a puzzle with respect to doch/toch and to shed some light on two theoretical issues. The puzzle is the nearly opposite meaning of the stressed and unstressed versions of the particle which cannot be accounted for in standard theories of the meaning of stress. One theoretical issue concerns the meaning of stress: whether it is possible to reduce the semantic contribution of a stressed item to the meaning of the item and the meaning of stress. The second issue is whether the complex use of a particle like doch/toch can be seen as an instance of spread or whether it has to be seen as having a core meaning which is differentiated by pragmatics operating in different contexts. We use the etymology of doch and doch as to+u+h (that+ question marker+ emphatic marker) to argue for an origin as a question tag checking a hearer opinion. Stress on the tag indicates an opposite opinion (of the common ground or the speaker) and this sets apart two groups of uses spreading in different directions. This solves the puzzle, indicates that the assumption of spread is useful and offers a subtle correction of the interpretation of stress. While stress always means contrast with a contrasting item, if the particle use is due to spread, it is not guaranteed that the unstressed particle has a corresponding use (or inversely)., ZAS Papers in Linguistics, Bd. 51 (2009): Papers on pragmasemantics

An account is presented of the focus properties, common ground effect and dialogue behaviour of the accented German discourse marker "doch" and the accented sentence negation "nicht". It is argued that "doch" and "nicht" evoke as a focus alternative the logical complement of the proposition expressed by the sentence in which they occur, and that an analysis in terms of contrastive focus accounts for their effect on the common ground and their function in dialogue.