User blog:ShalinP/Modal particles in English

Good day, everyone. After speaking a lot of German recently, I started to wonder about modal particles in English.

To be clear, modal particles are single words that have no particular meaning, which relate the sentence to the speaker's knowledge. It does indeed save a whole lot of words.

I know these exist fully in German, hence bringing it up, as well as in Dutch.

So far, I can only think of three particles, "even," "but" and "though."

For example, does he EVEN do it? (Because according to my knowledge, he doesn't.)

The whole sentence in the brackets is said by the single word "even" which saves a lot of time, and not having any specific meaning makes it great and so we should all learn them.

Another example is "BUT of course!" (the particle here highlights the agreement of the speaker.)

Instead of meanings, these little words carry an emotional meaning, for example agreement, emphasis, surprise, interest, contradiction, etc.

I also think it does good for written English, text messaging, etc. where you don't know the facial expression or vocal tone of the person you chat with, but the modal particles take the part of identifying the speaker's tone.

Can you guys perhaps help find all the modal particles and their meanings?