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Vagueness, Ambiguity, and All the Rest: Linguistic and pragmatic approaches
Edited by Ilaria Fiorentini and Chiara Zanchi
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 347] 2024
► pp. 147–175

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 a marker of non-exhaustiveness from old 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-exhaustiveness in list constructions and, until late 17th c., were frequently specified by a nominal modifier, which however was uninformative to identify the category. Contemporary Italian results confirm the role of spoken language in developing structures encoding non-exhaustiveness, 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-exhaustiveness, 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
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
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