This paper reports on a small-scale exploratory study of metapragmatic perceptions of apologies, directives, and modal particles in two national varieties of a pluricentric language in contact. It investigates the way in which Austrians and Germans (believe they) communicate in German when they are married to each other and living in an environment where the national language is not German, that is, where they do not need to converge toward the national variety of the wider community. The study finds that those informants of Austrian background tend toward negative politeness (Brown and Levinson 1987), focus more on blame and guilt, and engage more in the art of conversation. Those of German background tend more toward positive politeness and the verbal fulfillment of respectability. There is some evidence of convergence but a surprising amount of residual national variation in the realization of the speech acts. However, there is a limited use of modal particles and evidence of a weakening of intuition in relation to their use.We are indebted to the Australian Research Council for financial assistance for the project “Dynamics of Immigrant Language Contact,” and to Leslie Bodi and two anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions.

This paper is about a minor and so far neglected sentence type in German: wh-root infinitivals such as Wohin gehen? ‘Where (should one/we) go?’. I concentrate on describing their formal and interpretive properties in detail, and relate these properties in a nonarbitrary manner by suggesting ways in which the salient aspects of their interpretation, that is, (the specifics of) their modality, their subject interpretation, and their illocutionary use, could be derived from the interpretively relevant properties of their form.Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Typologie und Universalienforschung-Berlin (3/02, 5/02), the University of Pennsylvania (4/02), and the University of Frankfurt (6/02). Thanks to all the audiences for valuable comments and suggestions. Special thanks for constructive discussion and help with specific points of the paper are owed to many: Rajesh Bhatt, Veronika Ehrich, Ewald Lang, Manfred Krifka, Ingo Reich, Inger Rosengren, Joachim Sabel, Hubert Truckenbrodt, Ede Zimmermann, Ilse Zimmermann as well as the editor, Mark Louden, and two anonymous referees. A preprint version of this paper (here considerably revised) appeared as Reis 2002.