Come et ses propositions subordonnées en italien contemporain

This paper describes the syntactic behaviour, the different possible semantic values and some pragma-textual functions of dependent clauses introduced by come in contemporary Italian. These clauses may occur as arguments of a predicative element (a verb, or a relational noun or adverbial element) or as sentence margins — i.e. adverbial clauses, in traditional terms: in the first case they are embedded as objective/subjective clauses or indirect wh-questions, with a modal meaning ; in the second case the subordinating conjunction come expresses an inter-clausal link between the two connected propositions, with a modal or “analogy” comparative meaning, but it may be also inferentially interpreted in a range of other values. Finally, at the discourse level these clauses may be used by the speaker to comment upon his/her utterance, and assume an inter- or intra(meta)-textual function.