The Peculiar Particle Halt: a Linguistic Analysis
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2001
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics
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Thesis (B.A.)
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Abstract
This thesis is divided into three broad segments. The first segment examines the
discourse contexts in which halt may legitimately occur. Several reasonably detailed
discourse-excerpts from the German magazine Der Spiegel are provided as primary
sources; each of these excerpts reveals halt as a part of natural discourse. Some of the
questions asked in this section are:
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How is halt influenced by the discourse context it occurs in, and how does it, in
tum, affect the context?
What kind of meta-information about a sentence does this particle provide?
In this context, the meanings of halt as a function of discourse and the role of halt as a
mood-marker, are examined.
The second section looks at sentential and discourse contexts in which halt is not
licensed. It is seen that halt is not licensed in questions. Five types of questions:
affirmative yes-no questions, negated yes-no questions, wh-affirmative questions, whnegated
questions and tag questions are considered for their licensing properties of halt.
The English particle just, it is seen, is similar to halt in several ways: a comparative study
of the respective patterns of halt and just in the five question-types mentioned above is
made.
The rest of the paper attempts to understand the reasons, be they pragmatic,
semantic or syntactic, for the restrictive occurrences of halt and just. Another class of
items, that occur restrictively, called Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) are studied in an
attempt to understand the behavior of halt and just through them. The thesis ends with
some propositions about some pragmatic licensing conditions for halt and just.