Left outside: nominal operators in German and French

Building upon previous research on German, and on French, constructions of the type ‹ NP/N + utterance › are analysed. These constructions are used semantically and pragmatically for the discursive evaluation of an argument and contribute to the structure of the discourse. Placing these nouns in initial position, in advance of the sentence frame, signals the discursive or argumentative interpretation of the following statement, as does the prosodic break and the graphic marking (colon or dash, e.g. conclusion: ...) and means that these words are significantly similar to text operators. On the basis of an extended concept of grammar, the construction can be seen as a discourse marker. The starting point of the study is German, which has a larger number of forms used in this way. A comparison with French shows how differences can be explained which are not system related. These are related to usage, but also to the semantics of the nouns. The use of this construction in certain types of texts and communication is related to the progression of the text, and through a certain degree of routinization (Detges and Waltereit, 2016) these nouns have developed a new (discursive) status.