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Positioning the Self and Others: Linguistic perspectives
Edited by Kate Beeching, Chiara Ghezzi and Piera Molinelli
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 292] 2018
► pp. 197–218

Chapter 9
Constellation of indexicalities and social meaning

The evolution of cioè in Contemporary Italian

This chapter analyses the evolution of Italian cioè lit. ‘that is’ in recent diachrony. Cioè developed a social indexicality as in the 1980s it was associated with a young speech style. Through a corpus-based analysis of listeners’ phone-ins to a radio station, this study analyses the functions of cioè in the speech styles of different age-cohorts and its diachronic evolution over the last thirty years. The evolution of cioè shows that speakers employ it creatively, through a progressive bleaching of its original semantic and pragmatic values. The expansion of its functions and contexts of occurrence is so extensive that the expression became stigmatized as a ‘verbal tic’ characteristic of the language spoken by an age-cohort of speakers. These same social values are at the origin of the progressive decline of cioè in new generations of young speakers and in the community as a whole.
Keywords: cioè , reformulation markers, Contemporary Italian, social indexicality, age-based varion
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data and methods
  • 3.The pragmatic functions of cioè: Background and findings
    • 3.1Contexts of use and age of speakers
  • 4.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 17 July 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.292.09ghe
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Cited by one other publication

Ghezzi, Chiara
2024. Chapter 5. Social indexicality and pragmatic change in the late 20th century. In Language Change in the 20th Century [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 340], ► pp. 158 ff. DOI logo

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