Abstract
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.
Corpora
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© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Causal relevance of conditionals: semantics or pragmatics?
- Online comprehension of conditionals in context: A self-paced reading study on wenn (‘if’) versus nur wenn (‘only if’) in German
- Signalling conditional relations
- Uncertainty as a disambiguating factor for conditional, temporal, and habitual constructions: evidence from Spanish
- Veridicality and the cause-effect relation in Russian esli- and raz-conditionals: experimenting with conditional perfection and logical entailment
- Conditional connection explored: the case of Sicilian cusà
- Iffy discourse: Japanese moshi in conditionals and nominal topics
- Jiu-conditionals in Mandarin Chinese: thoughts on a uniform pragmatic analysis of Mandarin conditional constructions
- Modals and conditionals in instrumental practical reasoning: the case of Polish
- Emojis and conditionals: exploring the super linguistic interplay of pictorial modifiers and conditional meaning
- What embedded counterfactuals tell us about the semantics of attitudes
- Conditional conjunctions informed by Japanese and Korean
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Causal relevance of conditionals: semantics or pragmatics?
- Online comprehension of conditionals in context: A self-paced reading study on wenn (‘if’) versus nur wenn (‘only if’) in German
- Signalling conditional relations
- Uncertainty as a disambiguating factor for conditional, temporal, and habitual constructions: evidence from Spanish
- Veridicality and the cause-effect relation in Russian esli- and raz-conditionals: experimenting with conditional perfection and logical entailment
- Conditional connection explored: the case of Sicilian cusà
- Iffy discourse: Japanese moshi in conditionals and nominal topics
- Jiu-conditionals in Mandarin Chinese: thoughts on a uniform pragmatic analysis of Mandarin conditional constructions
- Modals and conditionals in instrumental practical reasoning: the case of Polish
- Emojis and conditionals: exploring the super linguistic interplay of pictorial modifiers and conditional meaning
- What embedded counterfactuals tell us about the semantics of attitudes
- Conditional conjunctions informed by Japanese and Korean