Ut ita dicam and cognates: a pragmatic account

This paper deals with the Latin functional marker ut ita dicam ‘so to speak’ and argues that its function is pragmatic in essence, since it functions both as a discourse marker, namely an interpretative device favoring the cooperative construction of the contextual meaning, and as a pragmatic marker capable of modulating the force of a potentially face-threatening statement or the employment of a daring term. Other formally close markers such as ut non dicam and ne dicam ‘not to say’ are also considered. Drawing on the Antiquitas section of the Bibliotheca Teubneriana Latina, a corpus-based approach is employed to integrate both quantitative and qualitative observations with a view to providing a semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic account of these markers as they were used across different texts and genres of the Latin language. Sociolinguistic remarks are offered as well. The paper closes with a reassessment of the status of ut ita dicam and cognates as functional markers and the implications for a functional based approach to the pragmatics of Latin.