Certamente and sicuramente: Encoding dynamic and discursive aspects of commitment in Italian

Abstract

Commitment should be understood as a dynamic and discursive category. This raises some important questions for the theory of grammar: to what extent do languages encode the dynamic and discursive aspects of commitment? At what level of analysis does this encoding take place? Which markers encode these aspects? In order to answer some of these questions two Italian adverbs expressing strong commitment are analyzed: certamente and sicuramente. Their distribution at the level of macro-syntactic discourse configurations is studied and contrasted. It emerges that the two adverbs select different distributional contexts. Certamente occurs in contexts that reveal its nature as a polyphonic trigger; sicuramente occurs in contexts that reveal its nature as a trigger of a paradigm of strictly internal alternative judgments. The encoding of the more discursive and dynamic aspects of commitment takes place, at least in this case, not at the morphological or at the syntactic level, but at the discourse level. Indeed, it is conveyed by the constructional composition of the lexical meaning of the two adverbs with the meaning of the discourse structures with which they are associated.

The conceptual structure of irreality: a focus on non-exclusion-of-factuality as a conceptual and a linguistic category

“…The tendency of magari to occur in list constructions such as the one represented in (20) has been confirmed by an analysis conducted by Masini & Pietrandrea (in press) in 5 By focus particles we intend with König (1991) and Nølke (1983Nølke ( , 2001) particles, such as the English also, even, only, or the French même, endowed with a remarkable syntactic mobility, having scope on a constituent and focusing on a part of it, interacting thereby with the focus structure of the sentence in which they occur. 6 Grid representations are a powerful discourse representation device elaborated mainly by Blanche-Benveniste et alii (1979), Bilger (1982), Blanche-Benveniste et alii (1990), Bilger et alii (1997), Gerdes & Kahane (ms.), and Bonvino (2005), Pietrandrea (2008a), Masini & Pietrandrea (in press) for Italian. This rewriting procedure consists of a representation of the speech flow on a bi-dimensional plane and is constrained by three simple rules: (i) the horizontal axis of the plane should feature the sequence of the positions that define the predicate-argument-adjunct structure; (ii) the vertical axis should list all the actual realizations within each position; (iii) a left-to-right and top-down reading of the string contained in the grid should render the linear order of the represented chunk.…”

On conceptual semantics and discourse functions

“…Modal adverbs are currently a much debated issue, both in formal frameworks (Cinque, 1999;Ernst, 2006;Cobb, 2006) and in functional approaches (Hoye, 1997;Capone, 2001;Nuyts, 2001Nuyts, , 2008Tucker, 2002;Kärkkäinen, 2003;Recsky, 2006;Wierzbicka, 2006;Simon-Vandenbergen & Aijmer, 2007ab;Squartini, 2007Squartini, , 2008Pietrandrea, 2005Pietrandrea, , 2007Pietrandrea, , 2008. However, there are several gaps in the existing literature.…”

The Italian epistemic marker mi sa [to me it knows] compared to so [I know], non so [I don’t know], non so se [I don’t know whether], credo [I believe], penso [I think]

“…[10][11][12][13][14][15]); epistemic adverbs (e.g. [16][17][18][19][20][21]); mental verbs (e.g. [22,23]); modal verbs (e.g.…”

“…The most systematic work, even though brief, is by Serianni [38] who considers mi sa as the most immediate and spontaneous way for speakers to express their opinion in contemporary spoken Italian [38] (p. 18), therefore as a simple synonym of credo [I believe] or penso [I think] [38] (p. 19). The main differences between mi sa and credo/penso are that the former has a more informal, colloquial, familiar use [38] (p. 19) and even more morphological restrictions: as a matter of fact its use is limited to 1. the speaker's I (mi [to me]), i.e., the first person singular only: the other persons (second and third, singular and plural) are ungrammatical: � ti/vi sa [to you it knows]; � gli/le/a loro/a Paolo sa [to him/her/them/Paul it knows] and 2. the simple present tense (sa [(it) knows]): any other tense is ungrammatical: past � mi sapeva [to me it knew], future � mi saprà [to me it will know], etc. ;…”