Mutamenti Pragmatici dall’Alto e dal Basso in Latino Tardo

This study starts from Labov’s proposal that distinguishes linguistic changes from above and from below based on the awareness that speakers have of a change. The basic question of this work is whether these two levels are recognizable in some changes - essentially pragmatic - in late Latin. The development of politeness forms is proposed as a change from above, while the development of minimizers, which sometimes results in terms of negation, as a change from below. In fact, using titles and address forms, related to formality and politeness, requires the speaker/writer be strongly aware of the social characteristics of his own and the interlocutor. Documents of the first centuries as letters by the Popes and the Christian hierarchies show signs of a socio-cultural change that results in new definitions of the self and, consequently, in the use of new address forms. On the contrary, everyday linguistic use, from below, shows how some recurring pragmatic needs determine developments that can affect different levels of the system in several ways. We will exemplify these changes from below with the expressions of small quantities used as minimizers (micam, guttam), showing how these forms are common in late Latin

Ut ita dicam and cognates: a pragmatic account

AbstractThis paper deals with the Latin functional marker</jats:p

Functional expansions of temporal adverbs and discursive connectives. From Latin tum, tunc, dumque to Old Italian dunque

This paper examines the synchronic competition and diachronic substitution of three Latin temporal expressions: tum, tunc (\u2018at that time\u2019, \u2018then\u2019), and later dumque (originally, \u2018while-and\u2019), and its Old Italian outcome dunque (\u2018then\u2019). Besides providing a new path of development and a new etymology for Italian dunque, we describe in detail the steps by which these forms gradually replaced one another and examine the factors at play in their renewal, showing that such forms all display a similar inference-driven functional expansion from propositional to discourse-organizational meanings. However, their subsequent development led to a functional similarity that is only partial, as is often the case in semantic\u2013pragmatic cycles. While discussing the nature of this cycle, we focus on the speaker\u2019s role in this type of change, which in our view can be summarized in the speaker\u2019s cyclical application of recurrent functional principles: phonetic efficiency, analogy, and regularity in semantic chang

Positioning the Self and Others

Though positioning has been addressed in social psychology and in identity construction, less attention has been paid to the specific linguistic markers which are drawn upon in discourse to position the self and other(s). This volume focusses on address terms, pragmatic markers, code switching/choice and orthography, the indexicalities of which are explored in different communicative activities.The volume is unusual in: i) the range of languages which are covered: Bergamasco, Brazilian Portuguese, English, Finnish, French, Georgian, Greek, Italian, Latin, Russian, Spanish and Swedish; ii) the inclusion of different communicative settings and text-types: workplace emails, everyday and institutional conversations, interviews, migrant narratives, radio phone-ins, dyadic and group settings, road-signs, service encounters; iii) its consideration of both synchronic and diachronic factors; iv) its mix of theoretical and methodological approaches.The volume illustrates some of the linguistic means speakers draw on to position themselves and others and hopes to stimulate further research studies in this vein

Synchrony and Diachrony. Introduction to a dynamic interface

That the two dimensions of language variation are closely intertwined is nothing new, although at different stages in the history of linguistics their relation has been overlooked, if not explicitly ignored (see section 2). However, still little effort has been made to provide a unitary account of their interface and, more importantly, little attention has been devoted to a systematic exam of the theoretical and methodological tools through which such interface can be better captured and analyzed. In this volume, we aim to i) gather together a good sample of phenomena in which the synchrony-diachrony interface is crucial both at the descriptive and at the explanatory level, ii) to compare how different theoretical frameworks and different methodological tools may account for such interface phenomena, iii) and to identify those factors that are more frequently at play in the interface between synchrony and diachrony

Marche linguistiche della soggettività nelle lettere private in latino

This study focuses on the linguistic means that speakers (or rather writers) employed to express their subjectivity in a Latin epistolary corpus (II A.D.). Private letters, and particularly the Tiberianus archive which is the focus of this analysis, constitute a privileged genre to undertake an analysis of linguistic elements that express subjectivity. Letters convey intimate emotional themes, personal points of view on events, feelings and concerns. Such wide range of topics is expressed through pragmatic functions that are encoded on the linguistic level by markers of subjectivity, i.e. linguistic elements that the writer employs to construct, negotiate, modulate, redefine and convey his own identity, opinions, relations with the interlocutor, together with his personal attitude towards the message. Moving from the analysis of the letters contained in the corpus Tiberianus, this study aims at defining different classes of markers of subjectivity, taking into consideration pragmaticalised units as the attention getter scis ‘you know’, hedges as vide si potes ‘see if you can’, or courtesy markers as rogo ‘I pray’. As the analysis of the repertoire of forms identified will show, the identity of the speaker is established or negotiated through a series of strategies that go beyond the use of referential linguistic expressions, projecting this identity at the level of organization of discourse in key communicative and complex interactional dynamics