Different sensitivity to variation and change: Italian pragmatic marker dai vs. discourse marker allora

Functional markers (i.e., a hypernymic term for discourse and pragmatic markers) are of great interest on a sociolinguistic level. An increasing number of recent studies have shown that their sensitivity to macro sociolinguistic variables together with their characteristic polyfunctionality make them particularly interesting objects of analysis of sociolinguistically-informed approaches. Both discourse and pragmatic markers are the focus of this study. The analysis developed in this paper, 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 sociolinguistic variation and diachronic change. 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 the two classes of functional markers are differently sensitive (a) to macro-sociolinguistic variables (i.e., diatopic and diaphasic variation) and (b) to diachronic change, and how such differences can be explained through a prototype approach, which seems appropriate to give a good account of the polyfunctionality of functional markers.