What’s App in Italian Linguistics III - General extenders
General extenders are just one example of the ways that the Italian language is used online. Credit - Pixabay
We can certainly get a lot about a culture from how people speak. But now, with the use of social media and online chats, we can widen our knowledge focusing as well on how people “write”. If you want to follow our columnist Rebecca Gatti in this journey through Italian “digital” linguistics, buckle up and get ready to find out how Italians really speak
Ciao!
I know it’s been a while, so I’ll try to remind you where we left last time. I’ve shown you examples from the corpus WhAP (the first Italian corpus of WhatsApp conversations) with some interesting Discourse Markers (DM) such as vabbè and senti (meaning “hear”).
Senti usually occurs in the initial position, and it’s used to draw the interlocutor’s attention, or to express hesitation, to allow time to gather ideas or to mitigate a refusal. It can also have a metatextual function to structure the discourse and can be used to delimitate the moment of turn taking.
Like other forms (usually verbs) with an indicative meaning, senti has suffered a semantic change, losing its original main meaning. This has happened in English as well, with forms like see, hear, listen.
Enjoy some examples of its different functions (all the occurrences for senti are from Federica Fiore, a fellow member of the project):
To draw someone’s attention:
To express hesitation:
To mitigate a refusal or discord:
Today I would also like to show you another category I am working on.
General extenders (GE) are a class of expressions with “a basic syntactic structure typically formed by a conjunction (in Italian e or o) followed by a nominal unit, whose original function is to ‘extend’ the reference of the nominal or verbal syntagma to which they are accompanied.”
In this case too, it is interesting to analyse both the strategies for creating GEs, and the different functions, since it almost seems as if they are not only used to extend the referent on their left, but also almost as a discursive signal or a filler of any kind.
Through the WhAP corpus, I have collected many occurrences of GE that I would like to present.
Let's start with a few examples of typical use:
The category being extended here is ”holiday periods when people are supposed to do a lot of shopping.”
The category that is extended is ”things that must be done in preparation for a party.”
The category that is extended is ”Rules to be followed when renovating a house.” The GE that is used literally means “dicks and decks” and it’s used as an extension strategy usually to relate to something that is not pleasant: in this case the rules they have to comply with for renovation works.
What these three examples have in common, despite the fact that different GEs are used is that they perform their typical function of extending the referent, placing themselves to the right of the last word/category to be extended, as well as - generally - at the end of the sentence.
But what we are studying today are the following examples:
In these cases, GEs do not extend any specific and recognizable category, but are almost always associated with particular states of mind. The speakers (in this case, writers) feel that it is better to use a GE to extend not so much a category as a state of mind that they do not want to investigate or explain further. They may not feel comfortable talking about it or it may not be the right moment or even think that the other person already knows what they think/feel about it.
Next time I would like to attempt to tell you more about GEs and link to the presence of WhatsApp voicemails in our corpus
Let me know what you think and if you have any questions write to rg712@cam.ac.uk.
A presto!