Alumna, Centre for Language and Communication Studies
University College Dublin, School of Irish, Celtic Studies, Irish Folklore & Lingustics
Recently completed her PhD in Linguistics at the Centre for Language and Communication Studies
Trinity College Dublin
Thesis Title: Temporal expressions in Italian - A relevance-theoretic account
About
In this thesis we provide an analysis of eight temporal expressions in contemporary standard Italian: allora 'then', ora 'now', adesso 'now', ancora 'still', già 'already', sempre 'always', poi 'then, also’, and mentre 'while'. Our overarching aim is that of arguing for an inferential account of these expressions, at the synchronic level, as opposed to a coherence-based or text-based account. Our framework is that of relevance theory; we shall make use of the theoretical tools it provides in our analysis, in particular the distinction between conceptual and procedural meaning and the notions of explicature and implicature.
Firstly, we hypothesize that these expressions may be given individual unified accounts, which show that their temporal, semantic uses and their pragmatic uses share in fact a common basic meaning. Secondly, we posit that these expressions can and should be given a monosemous account as opposed to a polysemous account: our account postulates the existence of a ‘core’ meaning which is enriched on a contextual basis. Thirdly, we hypothesize that these expressions may be regrouped in sets which are homogeneous from the point of view of the pragmatic processes involved in their interpretation. More specifically, we will argue that allora, ora and adesso constitute a group of temporal indexicals which encode procedural meaning and constrain the construction of the basic explicature as well as constraining the context for interpretation of the utterance. Secondly, we will argue that aspectual adverbs ancora, già are procedural expressions which point to a contrast between two alternative propositions and constrain the derivation of higher-level explicatures. In an attempt to apply the same account to sempre, we will find out that this aspectual adverb is best accounted as a quantifier which may contribute to the basic explicature of the utterance. Finally, poi and mentre will be shown to suggest different meanings in surface; we will nevertheless argue that they constrain utterance interpretation in a similar way to the indexicals in their temporal uses, and in a similar way to the aspectual adverbs in their non-temporal uses.
Data are taken from two corpora of spoken Italian, LIP and CLIPS. The consideration of naturally occurring discourse data is one of the novel features of the present work. The occurrences of these temporal expressions will be analysed in a wide context in order to better understand their pragmatic uses.
With this work we aim to contribute to the study of Italian pragmatics, which so far has mostly been carried out with a text-based approach and, in the specific case of temporal expressions, in an unsystematic way. We furthermore seek to give a contribution to the study of Italian discourse markers by shedding light on issues such as the type of units they relate and on the existence of so-called ‘fillers’.
Finally, our findings present implications for some of the topical issues in relevance theory, namely the encoding of both conceptual and procedural meaning by a single expression, lexical pragmatics, the study of interjections, discourse markers and in particular contrastive markers.
Contact Information
| Address: | Laura Innocenti |
