The grammatical reflexes of emphasis: Evidence from German wh-questions

•We present an examination of a non-information-structural notion of emphasis.•We introduce new evidence for grammatical reflexes of emphasis.•We provide a comprehensive account of left peripheral discourse particles.•We examine phonetic aspects of emotive speech.

This paper presents an examination of a non-information-structural notion of emphasis. We discuss word order options yielding non-truth-conditional effects that go beyond information structural interpretations by adding the evaluative dimension of speaker attitude to the meaning of an utterance. We introduce a new phenomenon in this context, namely cases of co-constituency of discourse particles and wh-elements in the left periphery of the clause. We argue that this construction shows several features of emphasis, and we substantiate our claim by a production experiment that investigates whether the construction shows some of the core characteristics of emotive speech.