Cover not available
Part of
Vagueness, Ambiguity, and All the Rest: Linguistic and pragmatic approaches
Edited by Ilaria Fiorentini and Chiara Zanchi
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 347] 2024
► pp. 148–176

Chapter 7
Vague stuff

Cose as a general extender from Latin to Italian

 | University of Pavia
 | University of Pavia
This paper investigates cose (pl. of cosa ‘thing’) as a general extender (GE) and marker of non-exhaustivity from Latin to contemporary Italian. The study employs three corpora: CODIT, LIP/VoLIP and KIParla. We show that the frequency of cose-GEs dropped in 16th c., when they started being perceived as colloquial. In Old Italian, cose-GEs already expressed non-exhaustivity in list constructions and, until late 17th c., were frequently specified by a nominal modifier, which however was uninformative to identify the category. Contemporary spoken Italian results confirm the role of spoken language in developing structures encoding non-exhaustivity, also in a dialogical sense. Moreover, recent data show an increase in frequencies of cose-GEs. Finally, we found more variability compared to the structure usually identified for GEs.
Keywords: cose, general extenders, non-exhaustivity, Old Italian, contemporary spoken Italian
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Rēs and causa from Latin to Old Italian
  • 3.Cosa as a GE in present-day Italian
  • 4.Data and methodology
  • 5.Cose-based GEs in CODIT corpus
  • 6.Cose-based GEs in LIP and KIParla
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Dictionaries
Published online: 26 September 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.347.07fio
References (43)
References
Barotto, Alessandra, and Caterina Mauri. 2018. “Constructing lists to construct categories.” Italian Journal of Linguistics 30 (1): 95–134.Google Scholar
Calaresu, Emilia. 2015. “Grammatica del testo e del discorso: dinamicità informativa e origini dialogiche di diverse strutture sintattiche.” In Testualità. Fondamenti, unità, relazioni / Textualité. Fondements, unités, relations / Textualidad. Fundamentos, unidades, relaciones, ed. by Angela Ferrari, Letizia Lala, and Roska Stojmenova, 43–59. Firenze: Cesati.Google Scholar
Cheshire, Jenny. 2007. Discourse variation, grammaticalisation and stuff like that. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11(2): 155–193. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Coletti, Vittorio. 1993. Storia dell’italiano letterario. Dalle origini al Novecento. Torino: Einaudi.Google Scholar
Cucchi, Costanza A. 2010. “Vague expressions in the European Parliament: A marker of cultural identity?.” In Discourse, Identities and Roles in Specialized Communication, ed. by Giuliana E. Garzone, and James Archibald, 85–107. Berna: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Da Milano, Federica. 2015. “Italian.” In Manual of Deixis in Romance Languages, ed. by Konstanze Jungbluth, and Federica Da Milano, 59–74. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Mauro, Tullio, Federico Mancini, Massimo Vedovelli, and Miriam Voghera. 1993. Lessico di frequenza dell’italiano parlato. Milano: Etaslibri.Google Scholar
Dines, Elizabeth R. 1980. “Variation in discourse: ‘And stuff like that’.” Language in Society 9 (1): 13–31.Google Scholar
Dubois, Sylvie. 1992. “Extension particles etc.” Language Variation and Change 4: 179–204.Google Scholar
Du Bois, John W. 2014. “Towards a dialogic syntax.” Cognitive Linguistics 25: 359–410. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Enfield, Nick. 2007. A Grammar of Lao. Berlin: de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fiorentini, Ilaria. 2018. “Eccetera eccetera e così via di seguito. I general extenders dell’italiano contemporaneo.” In CLUB Working Papers in Linguistics, Vol. 2, ed. by Francesca Masini, and Fabio Tamburini, 20–39. Bologna: CLUB – Circolo Linguistico dell’Università di Bologna.Google Scholar
Fiorentini, Ilaria, and Elisabetta Magni. 2021. “Et cetera, eccetera, etc. The development of a general extender from Latin to Italian.” In Building Categories in Interaction: Linguistic Resources at Work, ed. by Caterina Mauri, Ilaria Fiorentini, and Eugenio Goria, 295–316. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Formentin, Vittorio. 2019. “Problemi di localizzazione dei testi e dei testimoni.” In La critica del testo. Problemi di metodo ed esperienze di lavoro. Trent’anni dopo, in vista del Settecentenario della morte di Dante, ed. by Enrico Malato, and Andrea Mazzucchi, 327–354. Roma: Salerno Editrice.Google Scholar
Ghezzi, Chiara. 2013. Vagueness markers in contemporary Italian: Intergenerational variation and pragmatic change. Ph.D. dissertation.Google Scholar
Mauri, Caterina. 2014. “What do connectives and plurals have in common? The linguistic expression of ad hoc categories.” In Linguistic Papers Dedicated to Jacques Moeschler, ed. by Joanna Blochowiak, Stephanie Durrlemann-Tame, Cristina Grisot, and Chistopher Laenzlinger, 1–21. Genève: Université de Genève.Google Scholar
. 2017. “Building and interpreting ad hoc categories.” In Formal models in the study of language, ed. by Joanna Blochowiak, Cristina Grisot, Stephanie Durrleman-Tamem and Christopher Laenzlinger, 297–326. Springer, Berlin. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2021. “Ad hoc categorization in linguistic interaction.” In Building Categories in Interaction: Linguistic Resources at Work, ed. by Caterina Mauri, Ilaria Fiorentini & Eugenio Goria (eds), 9–34. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mauri, Caterina, Eugenio Goria, and Ilaria Fiorentini. 2019. “Non-exhaustive lists in spoken language: a construction grammatical perspective.” Constructions and frames 11 (2): 288–314. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Micheli, Silvia. 2022. “A new resource for the study of Italian from a diachronic perspective: Design and applications in the morphological field.” Corpus 23 [Corpus et données en morphologie]: online. URL: [URL]. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Overstreet, Maryann. 1999. Whales, Candlelight, and Stuff Like That: General Extenders in English Discourse. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
. 2005. “And stuff und so: Investigating pragmatics expressions in English and German.” Journal of Pragmatics 37: 1845–1864.Google Scholar
. 2014. “The role of pragmatic function in the grammaticalization of English general extenders.” Pragmatics 24: 105–129.Google Scholar
Pichler, Heike, and Stephen Levey. 2011. “In search of grammaticalization in synchronic dialect data: General extenders in northeast England.” English Language and Linguistics 15: 441–471.Google Scholar
Schmidt, Hans-Jörg. 1997. “Constant and ephemeral hypostatization: thing, problem and other shell nouns.” In Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Linguistics. Elsevier, CD-ROM.Google Scholar
Sornicola, Rosanna. 1981. Sul parlato. Bologna: Il Mulino.Google Scholar
Tagliamonte, Sali A., and Derek Denis. 2010. “The stuff of change: General extenders in Toronto, Canada.” Journal of English Linguistics 38 (4): 335–368.Google Scholar
Tagliavini, Carlo. 1982. Le origini delle lingue neolatine. Introduzione alla filologia romanza. Bologna: Pàtron.Google Scholar
Traugott, Elizabeth C. 2017. “Semantic Change.” Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Linguistics. Online. URL: [URL]. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tummers, Jose, Kris Heylen, and Dirk Geeraert 2005. “Usage-based approaches in Cognitive Linguistics: A technical state of the art.” Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 1 (2): 225–261. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vitale, Maurizio. 1978. La questione della lingua. Palermo: Palumbo.Google Scholar
Voghera, Miriam. 2012. “Chitarre, violino, banjo e cose del genere.” In Per Tullio De Mauro. Studi offerti dalle allieve in occasione del suo 80° compleanno, ed. by Anna M. Thornton, and Miriam Voghera, 341–364. Roma: Aracne.Google Scholar
. 2017. Dal parlato alla grammatica. Roma: Carocci.Google Scholar
. 2018. “List Constructions: A specialised means of text progression.” Italian Journal of Linguistics 30 (1): 173–200.Google Scholar
Weiss, Michael. 2009. Outline of the Historical and Comparative Grammar of Latin. Ann Arbor: Beech Stave Press.Google Scholar
Dictionaries
Du Cange, Domino. 1883-1887. Glossarium mediæ et infimæ latinitatis. Niort: L. Favre.Google Scholar
Godefroy, F. E. 1826–1897. Dictionnaire de l’Ancienne Langue Française (IXe – Xve Siècle). Paris: Viewveg.Google Scholar
LEI = Lessico Etimologico Italiano ([URL])
Lewis, C. T., & Short, C. 1879. A Latin dictionary. New York: Harper.Google Scholar
OLD = Oxford Latin Dictionary. 1968–1982. Oxford: OUP.
TLFi = Trésor de la Langue Française informatisé ([URL])
TLIO = Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini ([URL])
TLL = Thesaurus Linguae Latinae ([URL])