Getting the facts right: focus on adverbial verum marking in German

Abstract

Two types of analyses of verum can be distinguished: either it is decomposed into focus and a focused verum element or it is a single, non-decomposable specialized lexical element which operates on discourse conditions. This paper argues for the former by investigating adverbs like tatsächlich, echt, wirklich in German that overtly realize a truth related predicate by illustrating the parallel between verb-verum and these adverbs for which their lexical contribution and the contribution of focus can be distinguished. It is shown, however, that this predicate does not encode polarity but factuality, which is analyzed in terms of a modal object. The syntactic location is determined to be between polarity and speaker-oriented categories. Other effects regarding commitment and evidentiality come as a by-product of highlighting factuality.

Keywords

• verum
• focus
• adverbs; facts; modal objects