Discourse marking and the subtle art of mind-reading: The case of Dutch eigenlijk

After Saddam Hussein had been sentenced to death in Iraq, the Dutch Prime Minister at the time, Jan-Peter Balkenende, commented the following in the television program Buitenhof, broadcasted on November 11, 2006:(1)De doodstraf is iets waarvan Nederland heeft gezegd: ''Dat hoort eigenlijk niet''.'The death penalty is something about which the Netherlands have decided: this is EIGENLIJK wrong.'This statement yielded a great amount of criticism, the most lenient of which was that the Prime Minister was unclear about what he thought about the death penalty.More severe critics accused him of declaring himself in favor of the death penalty, at least in some cases.In the most favorable case for Balkenende -and judging from his utterances preceding and following the above statement, this is what he actually meant to say -he wanted to express agreement with the fact that Saddam is punished in the most severe way possible, corresponding to the atrocities he committed, without conceding the position that the death penalty is morally wrong.These diverging, or even opposing interpretations of one and the same utterance are due to the use of eigenlijk.Had Balkenende not used eigenlijk, he would have made a firm statement against the death penalty.In this paper, we will give a semantic analysis of this elusive particle.This article is organized as follows.In section 2, we will discuss previous accounts of eigenlijk and its German cognate eigentlich, and the differences between the two discourse markers.We present our monosemous analysis of eigenlijk in