The paper presents a unified DRT-based account of the meaning and function of two apparently dissimilar uses of the German particle doch, namely accented and unaccented doch in the middle field. It is claimed that both uses express the discourse relation Correction, and that unaccented doch additionally indicates that the doch-host is assumed by the speaker to be given in the discourse context. It is further assumed that doch is weakly ambiguous between various relations of contrast, and its underspecified meaning is defined in the framework of UDRT (Reyle, Rossdeutscher and Kamp 2007). It is shown how in concrete discourse, a particular reading is selected from the underspecified meaning representation, depending on the information structure of the sentence, as well as on the syntactic and prosodic properties of the respective doch-use. This process is modelled in the framework of the most recent version of DRT (Kamp, van Genabith and Reyle to appear) and the version of DRT that takes into consideration the focus-background division of the sentence (Kamp 2004).
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