modal particle
nounEtymology From modal + particle, attested from the first half of the 19th century. Calque of German Modalpartikel.
1
Human sciences, Linguistics, Sciences A word class that indicates the mood of an utterance.
- As far as we have been able to discover, no particles indicating the tense are ever used in conjunction with this or any of the other modal particles (except -il) , so that the time of the action must be gathered from the context.1843, Heinrich August Eduard Meyer, Vocabulary of the Language Spoken by the Aborigines of the Southern and Eastern Portions of the Settled Districts of South Australia:
- The modal particle da in Norwegian conditional clauses is a lexical item that is specialized for use in conditionals but it occurs in positive as well as in negative conditional clauses.2005, Thorstein Fretheim, “Is there a rigid boundary between semantics and pragmatics?”, in Working Papers ISK, number 2/2005, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, via National Library of Norway, →ISSN, page 116:
- Related terms
- sentence-final particle