Managing turns, building common ground, planning discourse
Discursive and interpersonal functions of Italian no(?)
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.
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
