Discourse particles provide important clues to our understanding of the s yntax-to-discourse relation. They are sensitive to sentence types and utterance contexts. As such they seem to contribute to the determination of illocutionary force. After providing some general background information on discourse particles, the present article focuses on the role of discourse particles in German constituent questions. Syntactic evidence is provided which s uggests that they are pre-VP functional heads which can to some extent be stacked. It is shown how the particles under consideration can access the force system, and how this access can proceed even in cases in which they occur in embedded clauses. After providing the basic architecture, we investigate the role of these particles in “special questions”, questions which are not interpreted as simple requests for information. The syntactic discussion is then extended to cases in which the discourse particle forms a constituent with a wh-phrase – [wh+Prt] – , as well as to cases in which this constituent interacts with particles in pre-VP position. The [wh+Prt] construction offers important evidence both in favor of the head status of the particles under investigation and in favor 1. We are grateful to Ellen Brandner, Anne Breitbarth, Anna Cardinaletti, Probal Dasgupta, Franziska Hack, Liliane Haegeman, Sibansu Mukhopadhyaya, Cecilia Poletto, Volker Struckmeier, Sten Vikner and two anonymous reviewers for their comments, to the editors of this special issue, to Daniel Burkle for editorial assistance, and very much also to Harry van der Hulst for his assistance. We also wish to thank the audiences of the Workshop on Particles, Cambridge, 30 –31 October 2008 and of the Workshop The fine structure of clause types (F ederation Typologie et universaux linguistiques/TUL, CNRS), Paris, 28–29 November 2008. The usual disclaimers apply. The two authors were members of the research program Clause Types – Cartography and Typology (2006 –2009) of the Federation TUL, which has supported this research. We also received support from the Konstanz SFB 471 which is gratefully acknowledged.