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Italian Discourse Markers: The Case of Guarda te *
Author(s) -
Badan Linda
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
studia linguistica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.187
H-Index - 28
eISSN - 1467-9582
pISSN - 0039-3193
DOI - 10.1111/stul.12127
Subject(s) - linguistics , expression (computer science) , syntactic structure , computer science , philosophy , syntax , programming language
This paper offers a detailed analysis of the expression guarda te lit. ‘look you’ in regional Italian of Veneto. Firstly, we show that guarda te is a discourse marker that can have two distinct interpretations associated with different syntactic behaviors and prosodic contours. Secondly, we explain the evolution of guarda te as a discourse marker in terms of a process of syntacticization. In particular, we argue that guarda te has different interpretive and syntactic properties depending on the structural position it occupies in the clausal spine within the Speech Act layer above ForceP.