The encoding of irrelevance in discourse: tanto between concession and justification

This paper sets out to investigate the linguistic expression of irrelevance in discourse, by focusing on the functions and uses of the marker tanto in present-day Italian. The marker encodes the irrelevance of a given condition, thus conveying a concessive meaning not distant from the value expressed by concessive conditionals or ‘no matter’ predicates. In the construction [p, tanto q], the marker tanto conveys the fact that q holds in any case, namely whether p, non-p,or any value of p is the case. After discussing how the notion of irrelevance has been treated in the literature on condition-als, concessives and predicates of indifference, we will discuss the results of a corpus-based study on spoken Italian, identifying and annotating all the occurrences of irrelevance-tanto. We will show that irrelevance may be expressed by a number of different discourse patterns, explicitly mentioning the irrelevant proposition, the null-effect and the motivation for irrelevance, or omitting one or more of these components. It will be argued that the cases in which speakers simply refer to the irrelevance of a given proposition are rare in our sample, whereas it is more frequent that they also mention the motiva-tion underlying irrelevance, justifying their indifference and thus crucially acting at the intersubjective level. We will show that tanto may also be used alone as a discourse marker encoding the speaker’s attitude of indifference: in these cases, tanto is pronounced with suspensive intonation, and subsumes under its semantics the adversative, justificative, and indiscriminative value, activating meanings that speakers are supposed to share

La atenuación a través de la ejemplificación en italiano actual: un estudio basado en corpus

El artículo se refiere a las funciones pragmáticas de la ejemplificación en Italia, centrándose en una serie de construcciones como non so (esp. no sé) y tipo (esp. como). Basándonos en el estudio de tres corpus lingüísticos, podemos hipotetizar que tales construcciones son formalmente heterogéneas. Sin embargo, todas se emplean para expresar atenuación. De hecho, estas se podrían concebir como procedimientos para conceptualizar actos pragmáticos con distinta fuerza ilocutiva, o sea como ejemplos de una amplia serie que tiene el fin de no imponer ni debilitar la carga de compromiso del hablante.The paper addresses the pragmatic functions of exemplification in Italian by focusing on a set of exemplifying constructions such as non so (Eng. ‘I don’t know’) and tipo (Eng. ‘like’). Based on a corpus-based study, we may hypothesise that such constructions may be formally heterogeneous but all of them are employed to express mitigation. Indeed, they may be conceived as procedural tools to conceptualise pragmatic acts with different illocutionary force as examples of a wider set in order not to impose or to weaken the burden of speaker’s commitment.The research described in this paper has been conducted within the SIR program (SIR project «LEAdhoC: The linguistic expression of ad hoc categories», prot. RBSI14IIG0), coordinated by Caterina Mauri

Lettere mercantili tra tracce di oralità e funzioni pragmatiche

The paper sets out to explore twenty-six letters written in Catalan between the XV and the XVI century and sent to Cagliari from Valencia by Pere Martí, a merchant involved in cloth trade around the west Mediterranean area. I will study the letters under examination by seeking to explore their intrinsic discourse and pragmatic dimension. Indeed, in spite of their being written, the letters display special properties that are typical of spoken discourse. In the light of this, I identified various pragmatic functions and properties; among them one can find: employment of address terms with both textual and phatic function, conversational routines such as dislocations, reformulations, parentheticals and polyfunctional connectives. Therefore, along with constituting an important source to reconstruct traits of social and economic history around the west Mediterranean area, the letters under examination are crucial sources to apply the lens of discourse and pragmatic studies to written diachronic texts.Il presente articolo si prefigge di analizzare un insieme costituito da ventisei lettere di argomento mercantile prodotte in lingua catalana a Valenza tra il XV e il XVI secolo e spedite a Cagliari da parte di Pere Martí, mercante di stoffe e manufatti. Intendiamo analizzare caratteristiche e operazioni squisitamente pragmatiche e discorsive alla luce di una prospettiva che considera tali prodotti scrittori come esempi di scrittura intrisa di tratti di oralità. Le lettere sembrano attestare una scrittura che mostra diversi tratti di oralità spesso correlati con l’espressione di sollecitazioni osservabili e ascrivili a funzioni eminentemente pragmatiche rintracciabili nel medium parlato. Diverse sono le strategie pragmatiche osservate: allocutivi con funzione testuale e fàtica, dislocazioni, riformulazioni, parentetici e connettivi polifunzionali – tra altre proprietà. Pertanto, oltre a fornire uno spaccato della storia sociale ed economica a livello delle sponde del Mediterraneo occidentale, le lettere mercantili in esame costituiscono un laboratorio linguistico per applicare approcci di pragmatica e analisi del discorso nel merito di un insieme di testi scritti

Conditional connection explored: the case of Sicilian "cusà"

Stemming from a wh-question, the Sicilian marker cusà (cu sa ‘who knows’) expresses several epistemic meanings, which can also reach the realm of conditionality. The paper explores the discourse profile of cusà as it emerges from the analysis of diachronic data (18th-19th centuries) and present-day spoken written Sicilian (web data). These data suggest the possible development path leading from the wh-question to new functions. We propose that the origin of this development can be explained in the light of the strategy of “impossible question”, while the diverse functions of cusà emerged through concomitant processes of desemantisation, reanalysis and subjectification

La reduplicazione nella codifica della maniera

Reduplication display a number of functiond ranging from the expression of plurality to the encoding of progressive aspect and intensity. In Italian, it can also convey manner, specifying the way a given processi s carries out or how a state manifests itself. Through the strategy at stake, complex espressions are creates with the purpose of conveying the meaning of manner based on the duplication of the main part of speech. The paper consists of two parts. Firstly, we aim outline a semantic taxonomy of the main and frequent manner reduplications as observed in some specific diaphasic and diatopic varieties of Italian. In the second part of paper, we will focus on Sicialian, where reduplication acquires values connectes with the semantic field of effeort/difficulty, slowness, or intensity through metonymic and metaphorical shifts of originally locative and quantificative meanings. We will adopt a usage-based approach, i.e., corpus data, spoke language data, along with consulting lexicographic sources as far as the variety of Siciliani s concerned

La reduplicazione nella codifica della maniera

Reduplication displays a number of functions ranging from the expression of plurality to the encoding of progressive aspect and of intensity. In Italian, it can also convey manner, specifying the way a given process is carried out or how a state manifests itself. Through the strategy at stake, complex expressions are created with the purpose of conveying the meaning of manner based on the duplication of the main parts of speech. The paper consists of two parts. Firstly, we aim to outline a semantic taxonomy of the main and frequent manner reduplications as observed in some specific diaphasic and diatopic varieties of Italian. In the second part of the paper, we will focus on Sicilian, where reduplication acquires values connected with the semantic fields of effort/difficulty, slowness, or intensity through metonymic and metaphorical shifts of originally locative and quantificative meanings. We will adopt a usage-based approach, i.e., corpus data, spoken language data, along with consulting lexicographic sources as far as the variety of Sicilian is concerned

Exemplification in interaction: From reformulation to the creation of common ground

The aim of this paper is to examine how exemplification is used in real-time interactions to make reference to conceptual categories. Based on real occurrences of spoken Italian, it is shown that in conversations exemplification is used cooperatively by different participants to perform several functions. Not only can exemplification be used to present or expand the reference to a category by both speaker and addressee, but it can also contribute to the creation of a mutually accepted common ground (examples can be employed to communicate that alignment has been reached or to communicate how such alignment could be reached). Finally, we argue that examples are part of a bigger picture of cooperative reference construction, where speakers collaborate reformulating the reference using different types of strategies

Conditional connection explored: the case of Sicilian cusà

Stemming from a wh -question, the Sicilian marker cusà ( cu sa ‘who knows’) expresses several epistemic meanings, which can also reach the realm of conditionality. The paper explores the discourse profile of cusà as it emerges from the analysis of diachronic data (from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) and present-day informal Sicilian, namely spoken Sicilian and present-day informal Sicilian as written by speakers on the web. These data suggest a possible path of development leading from the wh- question to new functions. We propose that the origin of this development can be explained in the light of the strategy of the “impossible question”, while the diverse functions of cusà emerged through concomitant processes of desemantization, reanalysis, and subjectification

Grammaticalizzazione, costruzioni e frasi commento in italiano parlato: uno studio empirico

Il fine di questo lavoro è analizzare il comportamento e le funzioni di alcuni marcatori funzionali che definiremo frasi commento. Si tratta di espressioni come credo, mi sa, guarda che – sintatticamente sganciate dall’enunciato ospite – esprimono una funzione meta-linguistica permettendo al parlante di superare i confini della linearità della comunicazione inserendo informazioni di secondo livello. In particolare, studieremo due frasi commento che derivano dalla coppia di verbi percettivi “sentire” e “guardare” attraverso un approccio costruzionista. Posto che le frasi commento non sono riconducibili a casi tipici di grammaticalizzazione, studieremo tali strutture medianteun approccio che guarda alla costruzionalizzazione di contesti sequenziali – al di là dello specifico marcatore. Mostreremo che guarda e senti occorrono in quattro costruzioni, sovrapponendosi solo in due costruzioni in cui assumono funzioni interazionali e testuali.The aim of the paper is to analyse a set of discourse markers from the perspective of construction grammar showing that, despite their similarity, the two markers guarda 'look' and senti 'listen' seem to specialise into different patterns, or constructions, the latter being treated as the output of conventionalisation of structured pairs of form and meaning aspects. 'Guarda' occurs more frequently in argumenative discourse, whereas 'senti' occurs in genuine interactional contexts (attention-getting) and in sequential contexts (such as opening-boundaries in discourse prefacing answers). The two markers belong to different constructions on a global discourse level. Specific meaning aspects are contributed by the co(n)text