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Discourse-oriented Syntax
Edited by Josef Bayer, Roland Hinterhölzl and Andreas Trotzke
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 226] 2015
► pp. 93–120

Italian adverbs and discourse particles

Between recategorization and ambiguity

| University of Florence

In Italian and its dialects, there is no evidence that lexical items functioning as discourse particle correspond to specialized functional heads, or that they have a truncated internal structure, making them into weak categories. Rather they have the syntactic distribution of adverbs, with which they coincide lexically. Therefore ‘discourse particle’ is the name of a special interpretation of adverbs, which also have a conventional temporal/aspectual/manner interpretation – to be captured by a scope(-like) mechanism at the LF interface. Temporal/aspectual/manner modifiers take events as their arguments – while discourse particles take the entire assertion (or command, question) as their argument, relating it to the store of propositional contents shared by speaker and hearer.

Published online: 16 December 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/la.226.05man
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