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Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 12: Selected papers from the 45th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), Campinas, Brazil
Edited by Ruth E.V. Lopes, Juanito Ornelas de Avelar and Sonia M. L. Cyrino
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 12] 2017
► pp. 1–14

Chapter 1
Modality, presupposition and discourse

The meaning of European Portuguese afinal and Italian alla fine

| Indiana University
| CLLE-ERSS (CNRS & Université de Toulouse II)

This paper provides a semantic analysis of the particles afinal (European Portuguese) and alla fine (Italian) in terms of the notion of truth unpersistence, which can be situated at the intersection of epistemic modality and discourse structure. In the analysis proposed, the particles are propositional operators and require that the truth of a proposition p* fail to persist through a temporal succession of epistemic states, this proposition being incompatible with the prejacent, and that the interlocutors share knowledge of a previous epistemic attitude toward p*. We analyze two main cases (plan-related and non plan-related propositions) and also show that these particles are indexical to one (or more) epistemic agent(s) and allow for shifts in perspective.

Keywords: epistemic modality, presupposition, discourse structure, perspective, European Portuguese, Italian
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Empirical data from European Portuguese and Italian
    • 2.1Plan-related propositions
    • 2.2Non plan-related propositions
    • 2.3Temporal uses of alla fine
  • 3.Analysis of the data
  • 4.Perspectival shifts
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Corpora used
Published online: 19 October 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.12.01ama
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Corpora used

La Repubblica corpus, a corpus of Italian newspaper text
[URL])
CETEMPúblico
: Santos, Diana, and Paulo Rocha 2001 CETEMPúblico LDC2001T62. Web Download. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium 2001.Google Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Amaral, Patrícia
2018. Expressive meaning. In Handbuch Pragmatik, ► pp. 325 ff. DOI logo

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