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Managing turns, building common ground, planning discourse
Discursive and interpersonal functions of Italian no(?)
- Source: Pragmatics & Cognition, Volume 29, Issue 2, Dec 2022, p. 347 - 369
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- 28 Nov 2021
- 20 Dec 2022
- 11 Apr 2023
Abstract
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.