Temporal expressions in Italian : a relevance-theoretic account

Abstract

In this thesis we aim to give an inferential account of the Italian temporal expressions allora 'then', ora 'now', adesso 'now', ancora 'still', gia 'already', sempre 'always', poi 'then, also', and mentre 'while'. The adopted framework is that of relevance theory; in our analysis we make extensive uses of the theoretical tools it provides, particularly the distinction between explicatures and implicatures on the one hand, and between conceptual and procedural meaning on the other hand. The data for the present work were taken from two spoken corpora of contemporary standard Italian: LIP and CLIPS. These corpora allowed us to examine the temporal expressions in a wide context, which is essential for an analysis of their pragmatic uses. A further advantage of using these corpora is that they consist in transcriptions of recordings of naturally-occurring speech, which capture the authentic use of these temporal expressions in a wide range of communicative settings. An additional corpus, CoLFIS, was consulted occasionally to compare between spoken and written use. In this thesis we argue that the temporal indexicals allora, ora and adesso are procedural expressions. In their temporal uses, they are claimed to constrain the construction of the basic explicature of the utterance by indirectly assigning a temporal coordinate to the proposition; in their non-temporal uses, they are claimed to constrain the context of interpretation. While allora restricts the search space for temporal coordinates and contextual assumptions to previous discourse, ora and adesso restrict the search space to the situational context.