Guarda, secondo me stai sbagliando! Marcatori interazionali da verbi di percezione in italiano contemporaneo

This paper explores the functions and the distribution of pragmatic markers derived from imperative forms of perception predicates in contemporary spoken Italian. When these elements are recruited at the level of pragmatics, the acquire procedural and intersubjective functions: they no longer act as verbs, but prototypically function as attention-getting devices. Through a corpus – based approach, contexts and pragmatic functions of perception verbs are investigated, with a special focus on the verbs of visual reception guardare “to look” and vedere “to see”. Both verbs have pragmaticalized as attention getters, however, moving from this primary interactional function, they have developed other verb-specific pragmatic meaning as turn and topic managing devices, fillers or other secondary, text-oriented functions which are strictly connected to their context of occurrence (e.g. their position in the utterance).