Het gebruik van het Brugse dialoogpartikel dè (/dae).

Abstract

This study exhaustively describes the usage of the dialogic particle dè in the Bruges dialect (as in Zie je do weeëre dè? 'Oh, here you are again!'). The text first presents a critical survey of previous traditional lexicographic descriptions and more formal linguistic attempts at analysing the interpretation of this discourse particle. It then provides a new, mainly corpus-based description of the placement, the syntactic distribution, the interpretation, and the constraints on the use of dè. The invariable semantic contribution of dè is rather scant: dè indicates that the speaker wants to react to something just said or to something perceptible in the speech situation. Though utterances with dè typically betray the speaker's heightened emotionality, it appears that a sense of surprise, which is usually claimed to be an inherent part of its semantics, is not always present. Moreover, it is not always the case that a wh-question with dè exempts the hearer from providing a specific value for the "X" represented by the wh-word. Knowing how to reply co-operatively to a wh-question with dè requires some amount of common sense reasoning on the part of the hearer. I argue for the necessity to describe dè with reference to the sentence types in which it can occur (e.g. yes/no-questions, statements, etc.). Although any given two types with dè share one or more properties, for each type there are special possibilities or restrictions that need stating explicitly.