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Discourse-pragmatic markers, fillers and filled pauses: Pragmatic, cognitive, multimodal and sociolinguistic perspectives
Edited by Kate Beeching, Grant Howie, Minna Kirjavainen and Anna Piasecki
[Pragmatics & Cognition 29:2] 2022
► pp. 347–369

Managing turns, building common ground, planning discourse

Discursive and interpersonal functions of Italian no(?)

ORCID logo | University of Genova
ORCID logo | University of Bergamo

This paper discusses the discursive and interpersonal functions conveyed by the Italian negative operator no(?) ‘no’, suggesting a possible pathway of functional enrichment that can account for its high degree of polyfunctionality. Drawing on the KIParla corpus of contemporary spoken Italian, we chart the values of no(?) as a discourse marker, which are all clearly connected to the incremental co-construction of discourse in interaction, either in terms of turn management or of shared knowledge and mutual alignment. We then explore its sociolinguistic distribution, showing that register variation plays a major role in this respect. We argue that conversational uses of no(?) as a discourse marker, including its role as a pause-filler, are motivated by cooperative needs in discourse construction, shaping its functional profile at the intersection of mental processes and communicative practices.

Keywords: alignment, turn-management, common ground, register variation, spoken Italian
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction and background of the study
  • 2.Corpus and methodology
  • 3. No(?) in dialogual interactions
  • 4. No(?) in monologual speech
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 11 April 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.21022.fed
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