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Article published In: Journal of Historical Pragmatics
Vol. 21:1 (2020) ► pp.83–108

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On the diachrony of giusto? (‘right?’) in Italian

A new discoursivization

 | Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH)
Published online: 28 August 2020
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.00037.vio
Abstract
In Italian, the adjective giusto (‘right’) has performed the discourse function of response marker since at least 1613 (DELI 2008: 671). In this paper, I argue that the adjective has recently undertaken a new process of discoursivization, defined as the diachronic process that ends in discourse (Ocampo, Francisco. 2006. “Movement Towards Discourse is Not Grammaticalization: The Evolution of claro from Adjective to Discourse Particle in Spoken Spanish”. In Nuria Sagarra and Almeida Jacqueline Toribio (eds), Selected Proceedings of the 9th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium, 308–19. Somerville, Massachusetts: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar: 317). In particular, I maintain that giusto may also serve the function of invariant tag (Andersen, Gisle. 2001. Pragmatic Markers and Sociolinguistic Variation: A Relevance-Theoretic Approach to the Language of Adolescents. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), a linguistic item appended to a statement for the purpose of seeking mutual agreement, verification or corroboration of a claim (Millar, Martin and Keith Brown. 1979. “Tag Questions in Edinburgh Speech”. Linguistische Berichte 60 (X): 24–45.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). Through diachronic lexicographic, quantitative and qualitative analyses carried out over a range of historical and contemporary dictionaries and language corpora of different varieties, the results will show that, although the use of giusto? as invariant tag is currently undocumented, records of such a use are in fact found since 1990. I explore whether there are positive correlations between the use of right? in English and the use of giusto? in real use Italian and AV dialogues.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Giusto? as an invariant tag
  • 3.Methodology and resources
  • 4.The analysis
    • 4.1Distribution in Italian from 1200 to 1947
    • 4.2Distribution in Italian from 1861 to 2017
    • 4.3Distribution in spoken Italian
    • 4.4Distribution in English from 1600 to 1900
    • 4.5Distribution in dubbed Italian
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
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2022. On the use ofsì?(‘yes?’) as invariant follow-up in Italian. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 23:2 ► pp. 175 ff. DOI logo

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