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Once known, always known. Turn-final sai in North-East regional Italian

  • Marco Biasio ORCID logo EMAIL logo and Dario Del Fante ORCID logo
Published/Copyright: January 31, 2024
Folia Linguistica
From the journal Folia Linguistica Volume 59 Issue 1

Abstract

This paper focuses on the structural and functional properties of a positionally flexible verb-based discourse marker, sai (lit. ‘you know’), which in its turn-final position is a conversational hallmark of the regional variety of Standard Italian spoken in and around Padova, in the north-eastern region of Veneto. Drawing from a series of distributional and scopal constraints (including the interaction with other turn-initial and turn-final verb-based discourse markers, vocative phrases, verum focus, and the negative polarity item mica), it is claimed that both turn-initial and turn-final sai are best analyzed as intersubjectively-oriented Common Ground management operators (Repp, Sophie. 2013. Common ground management: Modal particles, illocutionary negation and verum. In Daniel Gutzmann & Hans-Martin Gärtner (eds.), Beyond expressives: explorations in use-conditional meaning (Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface 28), 231–274. Leiden & Boston: Brill) activated by Speaker’s salient presuppositional biases of opposite polarity. Syntactically, within Interactional Spine Hypothesis (Wiltschko, Martina. 2021. The grammar of interactional language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), it is shown how both turn-initial and turn-final sai are base-generated above the C system, in the specifier position of the lower (Speaker-oriented) field of the so-called GroundP, and then moved up to the specifier position of the higher (Addressee-oriented) GroundP; additionally, the mild-rising intonational contour associated with turn-final sai is claimed to perform a call on the Addressee, which activates the corresponding Resp(onse)P above GroundP. These results contribute to the available literature on the micropragmatic process of construction and negotiation of context-bound evidential meanings, also as a tool to foster manipulative processes.

Keywords: verb-based discourse markers; North-East Regional Italian; Common Ground management operators; presuppositional biases; syntax-pragmatics interface
Corresponding author: Marco Biasio, Department of Studies on Language and Culture, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Largo Sant’Eufemia, 19, 41121 Modena, Italy, E-mail:

Acknowledgments

Although the final design of the paper is the outcome of the close collaborations between the authors, for academic purposes Marco Biasio is responsible for § 2.1-§ 2.4, § 3 and § 4, while Dario Del Fante wrote § 3.1 and § 3.2. Responsibility for § 1 and § 5 is equally shared. The authors would like to thank Viviana Masia for her unwavering patience and support through the various (and not always smooth!) stages of production of this article. Special thanks go to the audience of the international online workshop The Pragmatics of Evidentiality. Inter- and intra-linguistic perspectives on pragmatic aspects of evidentiality marking in communication for their valuable feedback, the participants in our experiments for their time and willingness, as well as to two anonymous reviewers, whose critical remarks on a first draft have tremendously improved the quality of this paper. Mohiy Tawfek Ebrahim’s technical assistance with the vignettes is gratefully acknowledged. The usual disclaimer applies.

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Received: 2022-05-31
Accepted: 2023-07-31
Published Online: 2024-01-31
Published in Print: 2025-04-28

© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Editorial
  3. The pragmatics of evidentiality: markers, strategies and implications for linguistic theory
  4. Articles
  5. Conjectural questions in Sm’algyax
  6. The epistemic conditional in polar questions as an argumentative strategy
  7. Evidentials and dubitatives in Finnish: perspective shift in questions and embedded contexts
  8. Evidential strategies in English: not just lexical
  9. Romanian presumptive in interaction: evidentiality and beyond
  10. Some notes on the role of modal particles in weil+V2-clauses in German
  11. The evidential meaning of presupposition and implicature between retractability and deniability of information
  12. The interrogative flip with illocutionary evidentials
  13. Once known, always known. Turn-final sai in North-East regional Italian
https://doi.org/10.1515/flin-2024-2001
Keywords for this article
verb-based discourse markers; North-East Regional Italian; Common Ground management operators; presuppositional biases; syntax-pragmatics interface

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Editorial
  3. The pragmatics of evidentiality: markers, strategies and implications for linguistic theory
  4. Articles
  5. Conjectural questions in Sm’algyax
  6. The epistemic conditional in polar questions as an argumentative strategy
  7. Evidentials and dubitatives in Finnish: perspective shift in questions and embedded contexts
  8. Evidential strategies in English: not just lexical
  9. Romanian presumptive in interaction: evidentiality and beyond
  10. Some notes on the role of modal particles in weil+V2-clauses in German
  11. The evidential meaning of presupposition and implicature between retractability and deniability of information
  12. The interrogative flip with illocutionary evidentials
  13. Once known, always known. Turn-final sai in North-East regional Italian
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