In this paper, a semantic analysis is presented of the Dutch particle 'toch' and its German cognate 'doch'. On the formal level they may appear as either adverb, conjunction or interjection, and they also occur in different sentence types. It is argued that the core meaning of both particles is the same. The range of uses differs, however, between the two languages. For example, German 'doch' can be used as an 'answering particle in reaction to a negative statement or question. This is not possible in Dutch. The core meaning of the particles can be explicated in terms of three steps: the utterance with 'toch'/'doch' represents a positive step. This step is preceded (implicitly or explicitly) by a negative step, which is in turn preceded by a positive step wich is identical to the actual positive step. For certain uses of 'toch' and 'doch', however, we have to assume a modification of this general schema. A Dutch novel (by Maarten 't Hart, 1983) and its German translation was used as a corpus. The original text contained 270 occurrences of 'toch', and the translation 230 'doch' s.