Illocutionary Force of Adverbial Clauses: Evidence from German

This study posits that adverbial clauses in the German can be categorized based on their degree of illocutionary force into three groups: (1) incompatible with modal indicators; (2) allowing the use of modal words denoting epistemic modality and inferentiality, but unable to incorporate modal particles within their structure; and (3) permitting the use of any modal indicators, including modal particles. The objective of this paper is to establish a relationship between the semantics of adverbial clauses and the manifestation of their illocutionary force. Data from the DECOW 16A and DWDS corpora are utilized. Through a descriptive methodology, the structural and semantic characteristics of adverbial clauses are elucidated. Componential analysis facilitates the construction of semantic models for complex sentences containing adverbial clauses. Contextual analysis is employed to uncover the influence of contextual surroundings on the illocutionary force of subordinate clauses, while transformational analysis is used to determine the degree of semantic cohesion among the components of complex sentences. It is demonstrated that the semantics of relationships between parts of a complex sentence predetermines the illocutionary independence or dependence of the adverbial clause and may influence its structural synsemantics / autosemantics.