On the development of the Italian truth adverbs davvero and veramente

The article compares the meanings and uses of the two main Italian adverbs of truth and truthfulness, namely davvero and veramente, across the whole documented history of the language. The investigation is carried out by inspection of two large corpora, Opera del Vocabolario Italiano (OVI; Old Italian) and Letteratura Italiana Zanichelli (LIZ; literary Italian from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century), supplemented by oral data from corpora of contemporary spoken Italian. While both items display a wide and overlapping polysemy, which includes objective and subjective uses, since the beginning of their documentation, veramente alone develops a new mitigation function when occurring in a confutational context. This represents a further evolution from subjectification to intersubjectification, in the perspective of Traugott’s model (Traugott and Dasher 2002; Traugott 2010a, 2010b), and arguably shows the relevance of interactional factors in semantic change, pointing in particular to the strong intersubjective potential of the turn-taking position, in which veramente occurs much more frequently than davvero.