Segnali discorsivi e segnali pragmatici: sensibilità al mutamento e alla variazione sociolinguistica

Functional markers (i.e., a hypernymic term for discourse and pragmatic markers) are of great interest both on the side of synchronic variational pragmatics and on the side of historical pragmatics. The sensitivity to variation and polyfunctionality of the two types of markers are the focus of this study. The analysis developed in this paper, which is based on diachronic and synchronic data on the Italian markers dai ‘come on’ and allora ‘then’, aims at verifying the hypothesis that pragmatic markers and discourse markers are differently sensitive to change and variation. The motivation behind such difference rests on the fact that pragmatic functions are more related to interactional dynamics, while discourse markers are more anchored to the co-text and tend to show higher functional and formal persistence over time. Indeed, pragmatic markers are typically related to the speaker’s subjectivity, to social rules and to contemporary cultural patterns, and hence are more ephemeral, while discourse markers appear more stable over time due to their anchoring to a “grammar of speech”. The paper shows how a prototype approach can effectively give a good account of the polyfunctionality of functional markers.