Italian come se “as if”

The aim of this paper was to analyze the 109 occurrences of Italian come se “as if” in a homogenous written corpus of 780 texts, with the aim to highlight the implied evidential and epistemic aspects, not yet explicitly studied in the pertinent literature. We used an interdisciplinary approach which combines linguistics with aspects of cognitive psychology of communication: (a) a Gestalt Psychology oriented perspective, (b) J.S. Petöfi’s Text Theory, in particular his model of Atomic Text, and (c) our view on evidentiality and epistemicity. From this perspective, we found three types of come se: (1) counterfactual; (2) conjectural (on a literal level); and (3) conjectural (on a non-literal, i.e. symbolic, level).