Expressive meanings and social applications of ‘do’-support questions in Camuno

Journal article

The first stage in grammaticalization is often an enrichment of pragmatic meaning. If a new form is more ‘extravagant’ or ‘expressive’, it may have a competitive advantage. The grammaticalizing form described here is a primitive ‘do’-support construction used to make questions, in an Italian dialect spoken in an isolated sub-Alpine valley. Living speakers describe why and when they would use ‘do’-support over the simpler, main-verb alternative. Logical meanings, which include an answer presupposition and perfective viewpoint on the event, suggest that the ‘do’-support form is a syntactically embedded, and pragmatically indirect question (Swinburne, 2021). The expressive meanings described here are: 1) those demonstrating prior thought (conventional presuppositions due to the syntactic structure); 2) subjective meanings expressing emotion and engaging the interlocutor (conventional implicatures of ‘do’); and 3) meanings exploiting indirectness for reasons of politeness (conversational implicatures). With ‘do’-support, the speaker is being polite and making an educated guess of the likely answer, while leaving open the possibility of being wrong. In the small, tight-knit, isolated communities of Val Camonica, politeness to neighbours is essential for long-term community cohesion. The politeness meaning has likely driven the grammaticalization.

Authors: Swinburne, N

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Journal: Journal of Pragmatics More from this journal
• Volume: 229
• Pages: 104-117
• Publication date: 2024-07-02
• Acceptance date: 2024-06-11
• DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2024.06.006
• EISSN: 1879-1387
• ISSN: 0378-2166
• Language: English
• Keywords: do-support; embedded question; conventional implicature; politeness; conversational implicature